The Lost Girls of Paris

by Pam Jenoff

  He followed her gaze out the window toward the smoldering remains of Norgeby House. “Olympus, it seems, has fallen.” His voice was stiff with disbelief.

  It wasn’t her problem, she told herself. She had been cast out months ago. Her world had been destroyed, not in the burning of a dusty building off Baker Street, but somewhere in the darkness of Occupied France when she had failed her girls and lost so many of them for good. But Norgeby House was emblematic of the organization that she had given everything to build. And now it was gone. Her eyes burned.

  She perched on the edge of the chair he’d indicated. “What happened?”

  “A fire,” he said, stating the obvious.

  “It might have been an accident,” she offered. Norgeby House, with its endless piles of papers and operators constantly smoking, had been a tinderbox waiting to go up in flames.

  “Perhaps,” he said, but she could tell by the tone of his voice that he was skeptical. “There will be an investigation.”

  Which did not, Eleanor reflected, mean that there would be answers. “Why did you call me, sir?”

  “A bloody mess,” he muttered, but was he talking about the fire or something more? He poured tea from the tray Imogen had left on the edge of his desk. “They’re shutting us down. The whole of SOE. Orders straight from Whitehall. With the war over, they say they don’t need us anymore. We’ve recalled all of the agents.”

  “All of the agents you can find,” she corrected. “Have there been any word of the others? My girls, I mean.”

  “Seven of the girls have been accounted for,” he said. For a moment, Eleanor’s hopes rose. But then he shared the list with her and she saw the notations: Auschwitz, 1945, Ravensbrück, 1944. “Places where the girls have been confirmed dead.”

  Dead. Eleanor’s grief and sense of responsibility for what had happened rose like a wave, threatening to drown her. “And the remaining five?”

  “They’ve been given a disposition. Missing. Presumed dead,” he said bluntly. It was an awful verdict, ominous yet uncertain.

  “That isn’t enough to tell the families. They were wives, daughters, mothers, for goodness sake.” It was true that some of the families may have put it to rest, lowered empty coffins into the ground or had a memorial service to remember. But for others, the unanswered questions hit hard. Like Rhoda Hobbs’s mother, who had sat sobbing when Eleanor had called on her with questions just days earlier. “Rhoda was a typist,” her mother protested, when Eleanor had suggested that she might have been lost during the war. “The last time I spoke with her, she said she was just running papers down to Plymouth.” Eleanor saw Rhoda in her mind’s eye, boarding the Lysander that had taken her across the Channel, never to return.

  Mothers like Rhoda’s deserved to know of their daughters’ valor—and what had become of them. Rage burned white-hot in her as she saw the girls, who had given everything for a promise, betrayed.

  “And there’s no word of them?”

  “I’m not supposed to discuss such matters, now that your clearances have been revoked.” Though not news to her, the statement felt like a blow. “But I suppose you deserve to know—there are reports from the camps. No records, of course, but eyewitness accounts. They say that the women were executed immediately.” Eleanor turned away, sickened. “Other than that, there has been no indication that any are alive. I think hoping at this point is foolhardy. We must presume them dead.” If he had sent her months earlier as she had asked, she might have found some of them alive. Now it was too late.

  Eleanor tried to steady her hands. She took the cup of Earl Grey he offered and felt the warmth, waiting for him to say more. “We still don’t know how they were caught. That is, how the Germans managed the radio game in the first place.”

  The Director cleared his throat. “You have notes, I assume, from your search?”

  She shifted abruptly, and tea sloshed over the side of the cup, burning her skin. “Sir?” she asked, as though she did not know what he was referring to. She prepared to deny she still possessed any papers after she had been dismissed and told to leave matters alone. But, of course, Eleanor had not stopped looking. She had kept digging through old newspapers and files from the Public Records Office at Kew Gardens, making inquiries through government contacts. She had not just combed all of the records she could get her hands on; she had spoken to every last person in Britain who had any connection to the girls, including the agents who had come back and the families of those who had not. There were complicated stories of arrests, dozens of rabbit holes, but none of them shed any light about what happened to the missing girls, or the truth of how they had been caught in the first place.

  Perhaps word of her inquiries had trickled back to the Director. She was a private citizen now, she thought. What right did they have to forbid her?

  But there would be no fooling the Director. Eleanor set down her tea and pulled the file that she always carried with her from her messenger bag and studied it. She handed over the folder containing all the information she was not supposed to have—and that she knew he would want to see.

  The Director thumbed through her notes and she could tell from his expression that they did not contain anything he didn’t already know. “Like I’ve always said, it’s a bloody shame about these girls.” The Director handed back her file and Eleanor clutched it tightly, the sharp edge cutting into the scarred pads of her fingertips. “I’m prepared to send you.”

  She could not believe her own ears. “Sir?”

  “If you’re still keen to go, of course. To find out what became of the missing girls—and how they were all caught in the first place.” He knew that she’d been more than keen to go. Those girls had consumed her, and she was desperate to find out about them.

  A dozen questions circled in her mind. “Why now?” Eleanor managed finally. After the months of rejection and pain, she needed to understand.

  “I’d been thinking about calling you for some time. For one thing, someone’s been asking questions.”

  “Who?”

  “Thogden Barnett.” Violet’s father. Eleanor had spoken with Barnett not two weeks earlier and had sensed among all of the parents that he was the angriest, the least likely to let it go. So she had fed him ever so subtly her doubts and questions about what had happened to the girls, let the ideas fester in his brain. An outsider, he could take it to his member of parliament and press the matter in a way that she could not. Apparently the gamble had paid off. “Most of the families have, as you know, tried to put the past behind them,” the Director continued. “But Mr. Barnett has been asking questions about what happened to his daughter and how she died. When no one answered to his satisfaction, he brought the matter to his MP. They’re threatening a parliamentary investigation. I need to be able to tell them how the girls died—or at least all of the ways we tried to find out.”

  But questions from a grieving parent would not have been enough reason for the Director to take the drastic step of sending her. “You said ‘for one thing.’ Is there another reason?”

  “Yes, this business with the fire.”

  “I don’t understand the connection.”

  “And maybe there isn’t one. You remember how you were asked to leave the files?” he asked. Eleanor nodded. The orders had been clear: touch nothing. “They’d said the files would be packed up and taken. Well, for months, the files sat. No one came for them. It was almost as though they had been forgotten. Then a few days ago, I received a message that the files would be picked up this morning for the parliamentary investigation. And then this happened.” He gestured in the direction of Norgeby House.

  “You think someone set the fire deliberately to destroy the files?”

  He grunted in tacit agreement. “The police say it was too many old papers in a tight space. But our inspectors found this.” He held up a charred piece of metal. She recognized it as one of
the timed incendiary devices they trained the field agents how to use.

  “It wasn’t just an ordinary fire,” the Director continued. “It was planned. I want to know who did it and why.” She understood then his sudden interest in having her go abroad. He thought that the fire, which went up just before her records were to be taken, might have something to do with the agents who had disappeared. Particularly the girls. Sending her to find answers about that might bring him answers as well.

  “You think it has something to do with my girls?”

  “I don’t know. The fire happened right before we were to turn the files over to Parliament. I’ve got people investigating that here.”

  But the only way to find that out, Eleanor concluded silently, was in France, where the network had collapsed and the girls were arrested. “We need to know how they were caught, where they were taken, what happened to them,” he said, rattling off the same questions she had been asking all along. But the biggest one was why.

  “You were done with me,” she said, unable to keep the recrimination from her voice.

  “We had no reason to follow up,” he replied, then gestured toward the smoldering remains of Norgeby House with his head. “Now we do.”

  The lives of twelve girls, Eleanor thought, should have been reason enough. “So you want to send me to find out what happened?”

  “I can’t.” Her stomach sank. He was going to say no again. Was this some kind of a cruel joke? “At least not in any official capacity,” he added hurriedly. “So if I send you, it’s off the books. What do you say, Trigg?”

  She faltered. These last lonely months of searching on her own, she had just about given up hope, accepted that she would never know the truth. Now he was dangling it in front of her. It was what she had wanted, had lobbied for. And now that she had it, she was terrified.

  “All right,” Eleanor said at last. “I’ll go.”

  “I want answers. Find them,” he said, “at any cost.” His eyes were blazing, the gloves off. Now that they were being cast out, he simply had nothing left to lose. He scribbled something on a piece of paper. “I’ve managed to have you commissioned as a WAAF officer. I can get you a stipend and the necessary paperwork to travel. We’ve got two weeks until they shut us down. After that I won’t be able to pay you—or give you the support you need,” he added quickly, knowing that the money meant almost nothing to her.

  She nodded. “I’ll go tonight, if arrangements can be made.”

  He held out the British passport. “It’s yours. You’ll need this.” She hesitated. British citizenship, which she had once wanted so badly, was little more than a reminder of all she had lost. But she would need it now. Pushing sentimentality aside, she took the passport from him.

  “Where will you start?”

  “Paris.” She might have gone to Germany and started at the camps. But the girls had all been deployed to networks in or around the French capital. It was where they had operated, and it had all gone so horribly wrong. “And if I need to reach you, how should I wire?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t.” The implication in his tone was clear. The lines were not to be trusted as secure. He stood. “Goodbye, Trigg.” He shook her hand firmly. “And good luck.”

  Eleanor left his office and made her way down the stairs and out the front door of headquarters. At the corner, Dodds waited for her by the car. Turning swiftly in the other direction, she ducked between the row houses so he would not see her. She crept through the alley toward the remains of Norgeby House. The fire had gutted the upper floors. She walked through the remains of the ground floor where their meeting room had once stood, rubble still warm around her ankles. She reached the spot where the door to the basement had once been. The stairway that led down to her cellar office and the radio room was thankfully still intact.

  She started tentatively down the stairs. Dirt fell from above, as though the whole thing might cave at any second. Eleanor was suddenly gripped with terror. It wasn’t that she feared death, but rather she didn’t want to lose it all now before she might get the answers she had been looking for.

  Hurriedly, she stopped before what had been the closet in her office. She went to the file cabinet. The files were all gone. She pulled the drawer all the way out to reach the very back, where whoever had cleaned out her office hadn’t thought to look. There was a steel box where she had left it, untouched by the fire. It was here the girls placed the things most dear to them before deploying. She should have taken the box with her that last day, but she had been ordered to pack and leave so abruptly that there hadn’t been time. She picked up the box. The lid fell off and a tiny baby shoe fell out. Eleanor retrieved it, stifling a cry.

  A voice came from above. “Is someone down there?” A flashlight licked the dark walls. Eleanor did not answer, but continued gathering what she had come for. Then she climbed the stairs once more.

  A young policeman stood at the top, looking surprised to have actually found someone in the rubble. “Ma’am, you can’t take that,” he said, gesturing toward the box in her arms. “It’s evidence for the fire investigation.”

  “So arrest me,” she said, then walked away defiantly, her arms full.

  It was the least she owed the girls after what she had done.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Eleanor

  Paris, 1946

  An onlooker would have wondered: Who was that woman who sat alone every evening at the bar at The Hotel Savoy, nursing a dry martini for four or even five hours on end? She might have been left waiting by a boyfriend or lover, but her face was not sad. Nor did she look ill at ease being a woman alone at a bar. She sat calmly, studying the after-work crowds as they flowed and waned through the revolving door.

  It had been three weeks since Eleanor had stood in the Director’s office and received his go-ahead. Though she had been desperate to get started, she had not been able to leave for Paris right away as she’d hoped; there had been paperwork and red tape, even for a mission that was not supposed to exist at all. Then she had to figure out how to get to Europe, jostling for a place amid all of the men and supplies being ferried across the Channel as part of the postwar recovery. Finally, she had secured passage on a transport ship. She’d stood on the deck, not minding the sea spray that kicked up at her face and dampened her dress. Imagining the girls who had dropped in by parachute or plane under cover of night, she marveled at the relative ease with which she was able to enter Europe now.

  Since arriving, Eleanor had made the rounds of the government agencies and embassies, trying to get a lead on someone who might have known or heard of her girls, any of them. Marie and Josie, at least, had been deployed to the Paris region and had operated here. The arrest of British female agents would have been unusual, noteworthy. Surely someone would remember.

  But the government agencies, still trying to reconstitute themselves after liberation, were in little position to help her. “I’m looking for records of German arrests here,” she had said at the provisional government headquarters two days earlier. “From the Gestapo or German intelligence, perhaps?”

  But the civil servant had shaken his head. “The Germans destroyed most of the records before the liberation of Paris. Even if we did have what you are asking for, the files would be classified. Off-limits to foreigners.”

  Coming up empty, Eleanor tried other places: the city coroner’s office, a displaced persons’ camp on the outskirts of the city. Nothing. It was more than her lack of status. (The card, which the Director had provided designating her as SOE representative of the War Crimes Investigative Unit, impressed no one.) The responses to her inquiries were cold, almost hostile. She had hoped that there might be some gratitude for the role the British agents had played in freeing their city. To the contrary, de Gaulle and his people wanted liberation remembered as a victory solely of the French resistance. A woman from Britain asking ques
tions, reminding people of how much foreigners had helped, was simply not welcome.

  Each night she came back to the hotel bar and she read over her notes and plotted the next day’s assault. She had taken a room at The Savoy purposefully, though she knew the Director couldn’t cover the cost. It wasn’t the central location of the once-grand hotel, or the fact that it was one of the only hotels in Paris whose kitchen had returned to nearly a prewar menu. Rather, The Savoy had been known during the war as a meeting place for agents and resistance. She hoped that one or two might still frequent the bar.

  There was no point in waiting in Paris any longer, she realized now, running through the list of leads she had exhausted. She had been here nearly a week and already the Director could no longer support her. She considered going home. But if she stopped searching, that would be it for the girls. Others would go on looking for the men; there were lists and commissions and inquests. Without her, the girls would disappear forever. No, she wouldn’t give up, but she might need to look elsewhere, rent a car and travel north to the other regions outside Paris where the agents had also operated.

  Across the bar, she noticed a man younger than herself with close-set eyes, wearing a gray wool blazer. He was pretending to read a Le Monde. “Procès Pour Crimes de Guerre!” the headline read. “War Crimes Trial.” But Eleanor could feel the man watching her over the top of the page. Her muscles tensed. Knowing when one was being tailed was something they taught the agents at Arisaig House from the start, but this was the first time that Eleanor had to worry about it herself.

  Eleanor quickly finished her drink and signed her tab, then started across the lobby to the elevator. She stepped inside her room, a once-elegant space that now suffered from a sagging bed and peeling wallpaper.