The Lost Girls of Paris

by Pam Jenoff

  Eleanor hesitated. She had trained the girls, backed them with everything they had. But she was just being overly cautious now, and it wasn’t like her. She had to believe that they were up to the job and would make the right decisions. Otherwise, none of this would work and the whole thing would fall apart.

  Eleanor had to make the call. She stared at the radio, as though she might actually be able to hear Marie’s voice and know it was her. Eleanor believed that, despite Marie’s difficulties while training at Arisaig House, the girl was strong and smart enough and had grown sufficiently in training to rise to the challenges of the field; she would have otherwise never sent her into such dangerous territory. She had to trust now that Marie would never let anything happen to her wireless. And stopping the transmission would mean delaying operations. It was this or nothing.

  She lifted her chin defiantly. “Send it,” she instructed Jane. Then she walked from the room.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Marie

  France, 1944

  Marie sat alone in the garret, waiting for the hours to pass so that she could transmit and trying not to think about the German on the other side of the wall.

  It had been over a week since Julian brought her to Rosny-sur-Seine. He had not come again and she wondered where he had gone in the days he had left her. The tiny flat was pleasant enough, with two paned glass windows, one on the front overlooking the street and a second at the rear facing the canal. Late-day sunlight shone through the latter now, causing funny-shaped patterns to dance across the worn duvet on the bed.

  It had turned out that the Germans did not just frequent the café downstairs. They were billeted in the same building, including one in the adjacent flat, which occupied the other half of the top floor, others below. When Marie had first discovered this, on a late-night trip to the toilet down the hall, she had thought Julian mad. Or perhaps he simply did not care if she was caught. But she had come to see that it was the perfect safe house because they never would have expected anything so close. And she took a peculiar satisfaction in transmitting quite literally under the Germans’ noses.

  Marie looked up at the clock. Five fifteen. Nearly time to transmit the message that a courier she did not recognize had brought her earlier. It was the waiting that was the hardest—and the part nobody had told her about in training. Each day she waited for instructions to transmit. At night she listened to the radio, hoping the BBC broadcast might contain at the end messages personnel that signaled an agent’s arrival, or might secretly announce that the invasion was coming. She had left the flat once to go to the market on the square on Tuesday and another time to the patisserie shop, little errands so the locals wouldn’t talk about that strange woman closed up in the apartment on Rue Anton. She’d been out so little that, except for in a few brief encounters with the landlady, she hadn’t needed to use her alias or cover story at all.

  Gazing out the window at the meadows bathed in soft light, she thought longingly of Tess and hoped the weather was nice enough in East Anglia to take advantage of the lengthening days and play outside after supper. If only she had been allowed to bring a photo of Tess with her. The image of the child was still crisp in her mind, though she had probably changed since Marie saw her last.

  Marie moved her chair close to the low table in the corner where her radio sat, thinly disguised as a gramophone, with a top that inverted to quickly disguise the device. She pulled from her slip the tiny paper the courier had delivered earlier bearing Vesper’s now-familiar handwriting. First she had to code the message. She felt in the lining of her shoe for the worked-out code, a small slip of silk bearing a cipher. The message was barely intelligible to Marie, filled with cryptic terms and messages that only made sense to Vesper and, hopefully, whoever was receiving it back at Norgeby House. She wondered if Eleanor might be there. Marie read the coded text she was to transmit several times to make sure she had it just right. Then she burned the original, uncoded message over the candle in front of her, dropping the last bit so her fingers would not get singed.

  She selected from the spare parts pocket the crystal that would enable her to transmit on the proper frequency. After inserting the crystal, she began to type the message that she had coded. The wireless key clicked under her fingertips with satisfying purpose. Her radio touch was light and deft. She had noticed her own improvement during her short time in the field, like a foreign language she had once learned in the classroom now becoming fluent in-country. She could weave together a message quickly without wasting a single word.

  A loud burst of laughter and song erupted from below, causing Marie to pause. She stood and walked to the rear window of the flat. The noise had come not from outside, but from the café below. She noticed outside the window, though, that the aerial wire she’d secretly hung the night after she arrived had dropped from where she had fixed it among the branches. Without the proper placement, her signal might not be sent. She opened the window and started to reach out.

  Then she froze, hand suspended in midair. On the balcony of the room below stood a German soldier, watching her with interest.

  Marie managed a smile, waved as though she was simply hanging wash. “Bonsoir,” she called, trying to keep her voice light. She pulled her arm back inside, then closed the window with shaking hands.

  She should stop typing, she knew. The German had seemed not to suspect anything, but he could be reporting her right now. She had to get this message out, though, and there were only a few more keystrokes. She tapped furiously and then stopped, her heart beating louder than the keys. She turned the radio top back over to disguise it as a gramophone, hoping that it had not been too late.

  Marie heard the footsteps on the stairs. Someone was coming. Had her transmission been detected? Destroy the radio, and if you cannot, then at least the crystals. The instructions she had received in training played hurriedly in her mind, but she found herself unable to follow them. She sat like an animal trapped in headlights.

  The footsteps grew louder. Would they split the door or knock, forcing her to answer? She gripped the necklace containing the cyanide capsule in her hand. “Chew it quickly,” Eleanor had said. Tess appeared in her mind, left behind without parents at the age of five. The guilt that Marie had buried all these months sprung forward. She was a mother of a small child who needed her, and who would pay the price if anything happened. Being here was simply irresponsible.

  The footsteps stopped in front of her door. Marie counted: seven, eight, nine. There was a knock at the door.

  Marie looked desperately over her shoulder, wishing there was another way to escape. Hiding in the tiny flat was impossible. The knock came again. Reluctantly, she walked to the door and opened it.

  She was surprised to see the pilot Will standing on the other side. “You scared me to death,” she said.

  His expression was serious. “Then stop transmitting sooner. I could hear your tapping all the way down the corridor.” His Irish accent seemed stronger now, hard on the rs. “You’ll do none of us any good if you’re caught.” Then his brown eyes softened. “How are you?”

  Bored and lonely and nervous living surrounded by Germans, she wanted to say. But it felt petty to complain. “What are you doing here?” she asked instead, as her fear receded. “I’m not scheduled to transmit again until Thursday.”

  “I didn’t come to bring you a message.”

  “Then what?”

  “Julian needs your help.”

  Her ears pricked. “To translate again?”

  He shook his head. “Something different.”

  Remembering her last failed mission for Julian with the bookseller, she was suddenly nervous. “What does he want?”

  “Enough with the questions,” he said. “Come.”

  Marie donned her coat and hat hurriedly, then picked up her purse. But she couldn’t resist one more question. “If Julian needs m
e, why didn’t he get me himself?”

  “It wasn’t safe for him to come.” Not safe. Concern rose in her as she wondered what might have happened. As the leader of F Section, Julian was one of the most visible targets in northern France. There was little the Germans wouldn’t do to find him. The dangers outside loomed all the more real. Suddenly staying here and being bored didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.

  Will led Marie down the front stairs to a Peugeot parked at the curb and held open the door. “Get in.”

  On the street, the shops were closing for the night. The bookseller, drawing his shutters closed, looked up but did not acknowledge her. The café below her flat was just getting crowded, Germans clustering around the bar and tables. She hoped they would not notice her.

  Will started the car and began to drive from the village without speaking. She studied him out of the corner of her eye. “Julian tells me you’re the air movements officer.”

  He chuckled. “That’s a very big name for what I do.”

  But really, she knew, his job was vast. He was the head of Moon Squadron, the ragtag bunch of pilots who, along with the RAF, made the drops into Occupied France. He controlled when the flights came and where they landed, who was on them and who left. And he handled virtually all of the mail that went between F Section and London. “My cousin exaggerates,” he added.

  “Josie mentioned you’re related.”

  “We were raised like brothers on Julian’s family farm in Cornwall,” he explained. “My mum was a single mother.” Like me, Marie thought, though she wasn’t ready to say as much to Will. “She left me with her sister for long stretches because she had to work. And she died of flu when I was eleven.” Will spoke easily, so unlike the tight-lipped manner in which the agents had been trained. “So Julian and I grew up together. And now we are all we have left.”

  “You don’t have any family back home?”

  Will shook his head. “I’ve always been alone. Julian’s kind of everyone’s and no one’s at all. He was married, though,” he offered, deflecting attention from himself. His face grew somber. “His wife and children were on a passenger ship, the Athenia, that was torpedoed by the Germans. There were no survivors.”

  “Oh, goodness,” Marie said. She had no idea Julian was hiding such pain beneath his intensity and focus. She was amazed he was still living and walking at all. She thought of Tess with a giant pang in her heart. If anything happened to her daughter, she would not live to see the sun rise the next day.

  “So it’s just him and me now, and I would do anything for him. Even though sometimes he’s dead wrong.”

  “You mean about warning the locals?” she asked, recalling his disagreement with Julian the morning she’d arrived.

  He nodded. “There are people who have risen from all corners of France to help us. The dry cleaner who uses his solvents to make false papers. An owner of a brothel on Rue Malebranche in Paris that hides us when no one else will. And the maquisards. These people will pay with their lives for what we are doing. They deserve to know what is to come so they can try to protect themselves and their families.”

  He pulled up in front of the small rail station where she and Julian had fetched the bike the morning after she had arrived. “Delivering me again,” she mused.

  Will smiled. “That seems to be my lot in life.” One day, perhaps, he would also deliver her home. The thought was too dear to speak aloud. “Your train will be coming in ten minutes.”

  “My train?” She felt a nag of disappointment. When Will said Julian needed her, she thought that she would be seeing him and that they would be going somewhere together. “I don’t understand. Where am I headed? And where is Julian?”

  “He will meet you after,” Will replied. After what? Marie wondered. But before she could ask, Will pulled out a piece of paper. “Memorize this address.” She read it: 273 Rue Hermel, Montmartre.

  She turned to him in disbelief. “Montmartre?”

  “Yes. Julian said to tell you it is time you saw Paris.”

  * * *

  Three hours later, Marie emerged from the metro station at Clignancourt and stepped out onto the steeply sloping Montmartre street. It was drizzling faintly and the damp pavement seemed to glow in the moonlight. The white dome of Sacré Cœur Basilica loomed overhead to the south, defiant and dazzling against the night sky. Dank smells rose from the sewers.

  She had followed Will’s instructions and taken the night train into Gare du Nord, made her way from the rail station to the north Paris neighborhood, a tangle of narrow, winding cobblestone streets lined with bustling cafés and art galleries.

  Go to the address she’d memorized, he said, and ask for Andreas; take the package he would give her and meet Julian at the Gare Saint-Lazare before the last train at eleven. “The package is absolutely critical to the mission,” he’d said. Then what on earth had made Julian send her, a radio operator with no experience as a courier who had been in-country all of a week? “The address you are looking for is a café and it will have a canary cage in the window. If there is no bird in the cage, that means it isn’t safe to approach.”

  The address Will had given her was a sloping row house with a café on the ground floor. L’ambassadeur, read the gnarled wooden sign that jutted from the window beneath a striped awning. She searched for the birdcage but did not see it. Panic rose in her. An empty birdcage meant that it was not safe to enter, Will had said. He had not told her what to do if there was no birdcage at all.

  Seeing no other choice, Marie walked into the café. It was almost empty, save for a group of men playing cards at the rear. The legendary singer Marie Dubas warbled “Mon Légionnaire” from an unseen gramophone. Behind the mirrored bar, a man in a white apron was drying glasses. He did not look up. What now?

  She took a seat at one of the tables and placed her gloves atop the newspaper, fingers facing out, a signal of the resistance she had learned in training. A few minutes later, a waiter came over and placed a menu in front of her. Marie hesitated, confused. Will had said nothing about this part of the plan. She opened the menu, and inside was a small skeleton key. She looked up at the waiter. He gestured slightly with his head to the rear of the restaurant.

  Clearly he meant for her to go there. But then what? Palming the key, Marie stood and walked nervously past the men who were playing cards. One of the men flicked his eyes upward and she held her breath as she passed, waiting for him to say something. But he was merely taking her in, appraising her in that way Frenchmen seemed to do. Not meeting his stare, she continued down a short corridor, past the kitchen and toilets. She found herself in a storeroom with a narrow set of stairs at the rear. Her nerves prickled; was this some sort of a trap? She looked back over her shoulder, but did not see the waiter who had sent her here.

  Steeling herself, she climbed the stairs. The door at the top was locked. She inserted the key the waiter had given her. It slipped in the lock, twirling around but not working. Finally it caught, and she pushed the door open.

  On the other side was a narrow, nearly dark room, an attic or warehouse of some sort. At the rear, an elderly man sat beneath a lone desk light, head bowed beneath a visor. Cigarette smoke plumed above him. Why had he not simply let her in?

  Closer, she saw that he was working on some sort of device, meticulously connecting wires. He did not acknowledge her and she wondered if she should say something. She knew from training not to give her alias unless prompted. One minute passed, then another. Finally he looked up. “Raise your shirt.”

  “Excuse me?” she replied indignantly.

  The man produced a package wrapped in brown paper, about the size of an envelope and an inch thick. Then he pulled out a roll of duct tape. “I need to secure this to you.” She raised her arms and lifted her shirt. Then she turned her head away, mortified by the indignity. He was businesslike, though, taking care not to touch mo
re than was necessary as he secured it to her body. “You’ll want to move slowly,” he said. “Don’t let it get wet, or it won’t work. And whatever you do, don’t stumble.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ll kill yourself and whoever is around you as well. The package contains TNT.”

  Marie froze, recalling from Arisaig House the detonations that happened all too easily. There had been rumors of one agent in training who had been careless and lost a finger. Julian could not possibly expect her to transport dynamite out of Paris.

  The man took a long drag from the cigarette that seemed decidedly a bad idea around the explosive. “Go,” he said, dismissing her.

  In the distance, a clock chimed ten. She needed to leave now if she was to meet Julian in time and make it out of the city before curfew.

  Marie took one step, holding her breath, then another, backing out of the room as one might ease away from a dangerous animal. She started down the stairs, each step feeling as though it would be her last. She forced herself to walk normally through the café past the men. Sweat coursed down her body and she tried not to think about what might happen if the TNT got wet.

  At the street, she stumbled, nearly falling. She braced, waiting for the explosion that would mean her end. But the package remained still.

  Thirty minutes later she stood at the entrance to the Gare Saint-Lazare. The journey had taken longer than it should with the dangerous package that she dared not jostle or drop. Even at the late hour, the station was packed with travelers, families with sleepy children and too many bags, soldiers who pushed past them importantly. Marie consulted the board and saw that the next train back left in fifteen minutes from platform eight. She started for it.

  She scanned the crowd, looking for Julian, eager to give him this package and be done with it. At last she spotted him, maybe twenty meters ahead, waiting for her on the platform. She raised her hand to get his attention. His eyes met hers, but he did not smile. His face remained solemn. Then she saw why: French police stood between them, inspecting the passengers individually as they approached the platform.