by Pam Jenoff
“Thank you,” Marie said guiltily. She gobbled down the bread, not bothering with manners. She wanted to ask for water, but did not dare. “The policemen, they were looking for me. How could they possibly know who I am, or that I am here?”
Lisette shrugged. “They seem to know everything these days.”
“And you’ve still had no word of Vesper?”
“Non. I’ve checked with all my usual sources. But it is as if he never landed.” Or, Marie thought, perhaps he had somehow disappeared. “There’s no sign of him anywhere and the others are all gone. Perhaps he didn’t leave London.”
Marie shook her head. “He did. There was a broadcast saying as much.” Who knew how much of the transmissions could be trusted anymore? But that part at least seemed to ring true. Julian had come back for them but never made it. “I’m certain of it.”
“You love him, don’t you?” Lisette asked bluntly. Marie was caught off guard by the personal question from a woman she hardly knew. She prepared to deny it. But Lisette’s expression was a mix of sadness and understanding; Marie wondered who the girl had lost, whether it was before she turned to this way of life.
“Yes.” Love seemed a strong word for someone she had known such a short time. But hearing it aloud, she knew that it was the truth.
“Well, wherever he’s gone, there’s no trace. Things are more dangerous now than ever,” Lisette said in a low voice. “Three students at the university were arrested yesterday. And the dry cleaner who once made documents for us, gone.” Since coming to the brothel, Marie had been awed by the extent of Lisette’s network, the way she was able to use her connections to get information and help the resistance. But Lisette’s involvement only heightened the danger. The Germans were tightening the noose and it was just a matter of time until they figured out Marie was hiding here.
“Now that you have food, stay downstairs and out of sight,” Lisette ordered. “Or was there something more?”
Marie hesitated. Lisette had seen it in her before she had even seen it in herself. “I have to go,” she said.
“Go? But the Lysander isn’t scheduled for another day.”
“I can’t stay here anymore. I’m bringing too much danger to you all.”
“Where can you possibly go?”
“I have to go back to the flat.”
“You foolish girl, it isn’t safe now. And you are risking the lives of everyone who helped you if you are caught.”
“I don’t have a choice. My radio is still there. I should have destroyed it before I left, but when I decided to stay and look for Julian, I left it intact in case there was further word from London about him. Now that I’m going for good, I have to destroy it.” She waited for Lisette to argue further, but she did not. “Thank you for all you have done.”
Lisette followed her to the cellar stairs. “Godspeed. And be careful. Vesper would never forgive me if something happened to you.”
Marie stepped out, squinting in the daylight, the brightest she had seen in almost a week. She hesitated, wondering if it would have been wiser to wait until after dark. But getting around after curfew was even harder. And if she didn’t go now, she knew she might never leave at all.
She smoothed her hair, hoping her bedraggled appearance would not cause her to stand out. But the pedestrians here were students and artists, their clothes an eclectic mix. Then she started down the boulevard, taking in the sloping houses of the Latin Quarter. She passed a cathedral, its doors wide-open. The familiar musty smell of the damp, ancient stones filled her nose. Marie paused. Once, she and Tess had gone faithfully every Sunday, hand in hand, to Saint Thomas More in Swiss Cottage. Now she entered the church and fell to her knees, feeling the cold, hard stone beneath her. Prayer flowed from her like water, for Julian and the other agents who might still be at large, for her family.
A moment later, she stood and started for the door, wishing there was time to light a candle in one of the darkened naves. But taking the time to stop and pray had been frivolous enough. Instead, somewhat fortified, she pressed on.
It was midafternoon by the time she reached Rosny-sur-Seine. The clustered houses seemed tiny and claustrophobic after the teeming streets of Paris. But as she neared the safe house, a feeling of warmth overtook her. Somehow, in the weeks she had been here in the village, it had become her home.
There was no time for sentiment, though. As she eyed the shuttered café on the ground floor of the house, Marie’s doubts grew. She should not be here. She hurried across the street, nodding to the bookseller through the plate glass window of his shop. Had she imagined it, or was his expression more uneasy than usual? She paused before the safe house. The café on the ground floor was nearly empty, the Germans who frequented in the evening still sleeping off the previous night’s drink. The window shutters of the landlord’s flat on the floor above, usually flung wide-open, were drawn. She walked around the back of the house, then stopped again.
The back door was ajar.
Run, a voice inside her screamed. Instead, she studied the ground. There was thick brown dirt, creased like the sole of a man’s shoe, looking out of place on the stoop, which the landlady, Madame Turout, always kept so meticulously clean. The dirt was fresh; someone had been there within the hour.
Marie looked over her shoulder. She should turn around and leave, she knew. Will was right; coming back was too dangerous. But she could not desert the radio and risk having it found. She started up the steps.
When she reached the top, she pulled out the skeleton key and promptly dropped it. It clattered noisily to the wood floor. Hurriedly, she picked it up and tried again to insert it in the lock with shaking fingers. She slipped inside the flat, wondering as she did if she was too late.
The flat appeared as she had left it a week earlier, seemingly untouched. The gramophone containing the radio looked as ordinary as a toaster or other household appliance. Studying the radio, an idea came to her suddenly: she should send one quick last message to London, signaling to Eleanor that Julian was still missing and that she was coming home. Marie knew she should not linger here. But she had to try.
She put the crystals in and turned the dial. Nothing. Her body broke out in a sweat. It wasn’t going to work. She checked the back of the radio, wondering if someone had tampered with it. Everything she knew about fixing the wireless set ran through her mind. But there simply wasn’t time. She needed to go. And she couldn’t take it with her without attracting attention. No, if she couldn’t transmit one last time, she would simply destroy the radio so that no one else could use it. She reached for the iron pot she’d nearly used to wreck it a week earlier, raised it above her head.
There was a quiet knock. Marie froze. Someone was here.
She looked from the door to the fourth-floor window, wishing the tree outside was heavy enough to support her. But there was no means of escape. The knock came again. “Yes?” she managed, setting down the iron pot.
“Mademoiselle?” a high-pitched voice said on the other side of the door. Marie relaxed, recognizing the landlady’s seven-year-old son, Claude. “There’s a message for you downstairs.”
Marie’s heart lifted; could it be a message from Julian? “Moment, s’il vous plaît,” she said, setting down the pot. She closed the wireless case and picked it up, starting for the door. “Claude, would you please tell your mother...” she began as she opened the door.
Pointed at her chest was the barrel of a policeman’s gun.
“Marie Roux,” said the officer who was holding the gun. “You are under arrest.” A second milice pushed past her and began to search the flat.
She raised one hand to indicate surrender. With her other, she tried to set down the radio case behind the door. But the second officer kicked it with his foot.
“Easy,” his colleague admonished. He smiled coldly at Marie. “I’m told you’ll be needing that.”
Chapter Twenty
Grace
Washington, 1946
“Come,” Mark said, leading her from The Willard when her meeting with Annie was over. Outside, Grace inhaled the fresh air, trying to clear the cigarette smoke from her lungs.
Mark started for the taxi line, but Grace reached out and touched his arm. “Wait,” she said, pulling back. “Do you mind if we walk for a bit?” It was a habit she had formed in New York, strolling great swaths of the city, block after block, when she was sad or wanted to think things through.
He smiled. “I’d love to. Have you ever seen the monuments at night?” She shook her head. “You must.” She wanted to protest—it seemed too far, too late. More than she had intended. But the air was crisp and lovely and the Washington Monument beckoned in the distance. “I did this all the time in law school,” he added, as they walked past the darkened government buildings. “But then with the blackout and curfew, I wasn’t able to for years.” He led her south on Fifteenth Street along the edge of the Ellipse. “So, was talking to Annie helpful?”
“In a sense. She confirmed what we thought from the archives—Eleanor ran the women’s unit for SOE. But there was something else.” Grace stopped, turning to Mark. “She said that someone betrayed the girls.”
“Betrayed how?”
“She didn’t know.”
“That seems fairly incredible,” Mark replied.
“Maybe, but she seemed quite sure about it. And she said Eleanor came to see her sister, asking questions because she was convinced of the same thing. You don’t believe it?”
Mark shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, everyone loves a good conspiracy theory, right? For those who lost loved ones, like Annie’s sister or even Eleanor, it might be easier to accept than the truth.”
“The girls disappeared during the war,” Grace mused, a picture beginning to form in her mind. “And Eleanor, who had recruited them, went looking for answers.” She had surely found, as they had, that the girls had died in Nacht und Nebel. But she had learned something else, too, that made her suspect a betrayal. That was the piece they were missing.
“In New York?” Mark asked, with more than a note of doubt in his voice. They skirted the edge of the temporary government buildings erected on the West Mall to accommodate the influx of workers during the war. Mark took her elbow to help her around a broken curb. “It doesn’t seem terribly likely that she’d find what she was looking for in New York.”
“It’s as likely as us finding what we are looking for in Washington.” Nothing, it seemed, was where it should be anymore. “Anyway, it might have not been her first stop.”
They were on the edge of the Mall now. Mark held out his arm and she took it, the scratchy wool of his overcoat brushing against the back of her hand. He led her to the right, toward the Lincoln Memorial.
“You don’t want to leave it alone, do you?” he asked.
Grace shook her head. “I can’t.” Somewhere along the way it had gone from curiosity to quest. It had become personal.
“What is it exactly that you want to know? The girls died. Isn’t that enough?”
“That’s the thing. Eleanor knew that, too, and it wasn’t enough for her. She kept searching. She wasn’t just looking for what happened to them. She was looking for why.”
“Does the ‘why’ matter?”
“Those girls never came home to their families, Mark,” Grace said, her voice rising. She pulled her arm from his. “Of course it matters. Maybe there’s more to the story, something important or even heroic. If we could tell even one of these families what led to their daughter’s death or that her life was not lost in vain, well, then, that would be something, wouldn’t it?”
“You wish that about Tom, don’t you?” Mark asked. “That someone could tell you his death wasn’t for nothing.” Mark’s words cut through her like a knife.
Frustrated, Grace turned and started away from him, up the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial. She reached the massive statue of the president seated at the top, seeming to watch sentry over the capital and the nation. Her lungs burned from the climb.
A moment later Mark caught up with her. Grace turned away, taking in the panorama of the Mall below, the long stretch of the Reflecting Pool leading to the Washington Monument, the Jefferson smaller but visible just to the south. Neither of them spoke. Mark stepped close behind her, his coat brushing hers, and put his arms around her lightly. Grace shivered. But didn’t step away. She liked him, she admitted to herself—more than she should for the short time they had spent together and more than she wanted. There was a calmness about him that seemed to center her. But there wasn’t space in her life for that now.
“I was still in school during the war,” he said finally, his breath warm on her hair. “But I lost two brothers at Normandy.”
“Oh, Mark.” She pulled away and turned to face him. “I’m so sorry.”
“So I have some idea of how you are hurting,” he added.
“I suppose,” she replied. But the truth was when it came to grief, each person was an island, alone. She’d learned that the hard way. She had tried to join a war widows group in New York shortly after she had arrived. She’d hoped she would find some connection that would help her break through the wall that seemed to have formed around her heart, but as she sat among those sorry women who had supposedly known what she had gone through, she had never felt more alone.
But she did not want the conversation to turn to her. “I’m exhausted,” she said finally.
“It’s been a long day,” he agreed. “And it’s late. Let’s go.”
Half an hour later the taxi they had hailed at the edge of the Mall dropped them back at Mark’s house in Georgetown. Inside, he made a fire in the grate and poured them each a brandy, just as she’d had at the restaurant the night they met. “Wait here,” he said, leaving her to sit and think. She sat in the oversize leather chair and took a large sip of her drink, welcoming the burn.
He returned a few minutes later with two plates, each holding a ham-and-cheese sandwich. “That looks delicious,” she remarked, suddenly realizing how hungry she actually was.
“It’s nothing fancy,” he said, passing her a napkin. “But I’ve learned to make due with what’s in the icebox, being on my own and all.”
“Has it always been that way?” she asked. “Just you, I mean.” The question was too personal.
He shrugged. “More or less. I dated a few girls in college and law school, but I never got stuck on one girl the way Tom did on you.” Grace felt flattered and sad at the same time. “After graduation, I went right to the War Crimes Office and then here. Life just seems to carry me too quickly to settle down, and I haven’t found a girl who can keep up—at least not yet. Really it’s just me and my work all the time.” He smiled. “At least until now,” he added bluntly.
Grace looked away, caught off guard by the admission. She had sensed, of course, that Mark had feelings for her. There was something between them that went well beyond the night they had spent together, or even their shared connection with Tom. But it was that connection that made it so very hard to contemplate.
Why now? she wondered. A year was a respectable time for a widow to wait before dating. Tom would have wanted her to move on and be happy, or at least she thought so; he had died so young and so suddenly, they never had the chance to discuss such things. And he thought the world of Mark. No, it wasn’t Tom’s memory that held her up. She had built her own little world in New York, a kind of fortress where she only depended on herself. She wasn’t ready to let anyone else in.
“And you? What did you do during the war?” he asked.
Grace relaxed slightly, blotting at her mouth with the napkin. “I was a postal censor near Westport, where my parents live. Just something to keep me busy while Tom was off fighting. We were supposed to move to Boston an
d buy a house when he came back.” Those dreams seemed so distant, like tissue paper crumpled and thrown away without a second thought. She cleared her throat.
“And now you’re living in New York.”
“I am.” She could not have imagined that the city would suit her so.
“Does your family mind?”
“They don’t know I’m there,” she confessed. “They think I’m with my girlfriend Marcia at her family’s place in the Hamptons, recovering.” Because that is what a good widow would do—and Grace had always been the good girl.
“So you ran away?”
“Yes.” It wasn’t as if she had done anything wrong. She was an adult, no children to care for and no husband. She simply picked up and left. “And I don’t want to go back.”
“Were things so very bad at home?”
“No.” That was the thing of it. They hadn’t been bad at all, really. “Just not right for me. I went right from my parents’ home to Tom without ever thinking about what I wanted for me.” And when Tom died, she realized guiltily, it felt like a fresh start.
Suddenly it was all too much. “I’m rather tired. I’m going to turn in,” Grace said, heading for the guest room down the hall he’d pointed out earlier.
Grace closed the door and lay down in the unfamiliar bed, still dressed, the sheets cool and crisp. The headlights from passing cars caused patterns to dance on the ceiling. She heard water running, the sounds of Mark washing. A creak as he lay down in his own bed.
Grace closed her eyes and tried to rest. She saw Eleanor and the girls then in her mind, seeming to call to her, wanting to tell her something. A betrayal, Annie had said. Someone had given up the girls to the Germans. It might have been another agent in the field. But the girls who had been caught were not all operating near Paris as part of the Vesper circuit, or even the adjacent networks. They had been scattered all over France. To have information on all of them, one would have to have been very high up—or even in charge of it all.
Grace sat up with a jolt. She leaped from bed and raced from the room, feeling propelled by something other than herself. A moment later, she found herself standing in the doorway to Mark’s bedroom. She knocked. Turn away, she thought, panicking. But it was too late. He had opened the door and stood before her, shirt half unbuttoned. “Is everything all right? Did you need something?”