The Lost Girls of Paris

by Pam Jenoff

  There was a knock at the door. Eleanor jumped, then looked through the peephole. The man from the bar. Rather overt for one who was tailing her, Eleanor thought. For a moment, she considered not answering. But the man had clearly seen her come upstairs, and he might have information she was looking for. She opened the door a crack. “Yes?”

  “I’m Henri Duquet. I was with the French resistance.” Once speaking such words aloud would have been a death sentence; now he wore it like a badge of honor.

  She hesitated, still uncertain how he had found her or what he wanted. “I’m Eleanor Trigg,” she offered cautiously, opening the door wider.

  He stepped inside, setting down the newspaper he had been reading at the bar. He eyed her coolly. “I saw you over at the ministry where I work. You’ve been asking questions all over Paris. People are not happy about it.”

  “Which people?” He did not answer. “Did you know the agents of the Vesper circuit during the war?” she asked. “Vesper? Renee Demare?” She used the girl’s code name as a reflex, then remembered it didn’t matter anymore. “I mean, Marie Roux? Do you know what happened to them?” It could be a bluff. She tried not to get too excited. “If it is a question of money...” she began, calculating how much she could give him from her own funds and still have enough for the trip home.

  “Non!” he said fiercely, and she worried that she had offended him. Suddenly, the man grabbed her arm. Looking into his seething eyes, she knew he was angry. “Come,” he said. “I want to show you the blood that is on your hands.”

  * * *

  Forty minutes later Eleanor found herself standing in the middle of Gestapo headquarters in Paris.

  “Blood on my hands?” Eleanor had repeated questioningly as Henri Duquet had led her from the hotel. “I have no idea what you are talking about.” Eleanor felt guilty, to be sure, that she had not acted sooner on the radio transmissions and forced the Director to listen. But this Frenchman could not possibly know that.

  As he had led her toward an awaiting Renault, she had tensed. Never let an assailant take you from the primary scene of encounter; it was a cardinal rule of espionage. Once you were removed from your familiar territory, you were vulnerable and weak. She had no business going God knows where with this stranger who so clearly despised her.

  “Where are you taking me?” she demanded. He didn’t answer. She thought about resisting, even making a scene to stop him. But he might have information about her girls.

  Henri did not speak as he drove through the streets of Paris at dusk. Eleanor hadn’t really paid much attention to the city as she had rushed from one government building to another during her first few days of inquiries. Now she studied the scene outside the window, partly to calm her nerves and partly to make careful note of their route in case she had to find her way back in a hurry. The streets were brisk; fashionably clad couples chatted behind the wide café windows, shopkeepers drew down the awnings for the night. But there was a kind of haze from the war that seemed to linger over it all, muting the once-gay colors.

  Finally, the car turned onto a wide residential street. Avenue Foch, a sign at the corner read. Eleanor knew immediately where they were going. Her stomach tensed. She had read about No. 84 Avenue Foch in the intelligence reports during the war. It had been the Paris headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst, the German counterintelligence agency.

  Easy, she thought, willing herself to breathe as the car came to a halt before a five-story town house with wrought iron balconies on every floor. The SD no longer existed. Henri Duquet was a member of the resistance. He was an ally, or at least he should have been once. Surely, he had brought her here for answers.

  Eleanor stepped out of the car. The winter air was bitingly cold, a sharp wind whipping across and cutting into her as it sliced across the wide boulevards. The flagpole above the doorway, which had undoubtedly flown a swastika a year earlier, was bare. Henri unlocked the door to the building and she wondered how he had gotten such access. Inside, the foyer was still. It looked like any other house that had been converted for office use, yet Eleanor had read, too often, of the atrocities that had taken place here while interrogating prisoners. She shuddered inwardly, steeling herself as she followed Henri up the stairs.

  “Here.” He opened a door on the first floor and allowed her to step through. It was an office, no bigger than the Director’s back at headquarters, with a desk, plus a small table with chairs. The office had been abandoned by the Germans months ago but the walls still reeked of cigarette smoke and urine and something else metallic and rotten.

  She saw it then in the corner, one of their own radio sets—undoubtedly the one that had caused their downfall. “The radio... How did they get it?”

  “We believe there was a Marseille sector infiltrated by the Germans. After the agents from Marseille were arrested, the Germans obtained the wireless set. Then, by impersonating various wireless operators, they were able to get the locations of the drops of weapons and even personnel. More arrests and even more radios. This particular set, I think, came later.”

  “But how could they impersonate the agents? The radios had security features. There were the worked-out codes, the crystals and the security checks.”

  “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. Some of the crystals overlapped in frequency. And the ciphers do not appear to have been unique. So it would be possible to broadcast as an agent, even if you didn’t have her exact silks or crystals.” It was a sloppy detail and Eleanor berated herself for not having fixed it when she had the chance. “And the security checks?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  Eleanor walked toward the radio. She ran her fingers over it. One of the radio keys was bent. Her mind reeled back to the day at Arisaig House when she had dismantled Marie’s radio, testing her to see if she had what it took. She knew then without a shadow of a doubt that Marie had been arrested by the Germans.

  “Did you see the operator?”

  Henri shook his head. “I wasn’t here personally. But we had a contact, a woman who cooked and cleaned for the Germans. She told us of an Englishwoman who had been brought here but refused to cooperate and transmit over the wireless. She held out as long as she could.”

  Eleanor cleared her throat. “Was Vesper here, too?”

  At the mention of the name, Henri’s face hardened. “Yes.”

  “Where were they kept?”

  He led her out of the room, up a narrow flight of stairs, then another. A moment later she stood inside a tiny attic room. It was not at all what she expected for the holding cell at SD headquarters, where the most-wanted fugitives were brought for questioning. There were a half-dozen dormitory-style beds like the ones the girls had slept in during training at Arisaig House. A dusty, overflowing bookshelf sat in one corner. The room was bare now, no sheets or clothes or other personal effects. But there were little signs of those who had gone before, letters and other markings carved into the iron bed frames. The mattress of the bed closest to her was stained with blood. Eleanor looked out the window. The tip of the Eiffel Tower was just barely visible over the rooftops. She imagined what it was like for those who had spent their last days here, viewing the splendor of Paris from so close, yet trapped in his or her own despair.

  “Here is where they were kept during questioning. A few days, maybe a week at most. Then the Germans were done with them.”

  “And from here?”

  “Some went to Fresnes prison. Others, like Vesper, were killed here, shot in the head.” He said this unflinchingly.

  Eleanor knew that Vesper died, but until that moment had not known how. “And the radio operator?”

  “I don’t know. Fresnes, I’d imagine. When the prison was emptied, those held there were sent to Natzweiler,” he added.

  Eleanor shuddered at the name of the concentration camp on French soil where so many of the capture
d male agents had reportedly perished. But something puzzled her. “Why not Ravensbrück? Natzweiler was only for the men, wasn’t it?”

  “Perhaps because they didn’t expect to keep them alive very long. The Germans killed them without records. Nacht und Nebel.”

  Night and Fog. Eleanor had heard of the program at headquarters, meant to make prisoners disappear without a trace. She pressed back the tears that burned heavy against her eyelids. “How long?” she asked Henri. “How long before the invasion were they taken from here?”

  “Not more than a few weeks.” She gasped. They had come so close to making it.

  “You know they weren’t the only ones who died,” Henri said abruptly.

  She nodded. “I know. You lost people as well.” It was another reality of what had happened; even as the agents were working to liberate Europe, civilians had become caught in the cross fire. Not just partisans, but ordinary men, women and children. Some had been killed as collateral damage in the acts of sabotage—the factory workers when a bomb was set, or the driver of a train that had been derailed. Still others lost their lives through German reprisals against the resistance. Churchill had said to set Europe ablaze, but the hard truth was that innocents got burned.

  Eleanor stood in the middle of the tiny attic space, seeing Marie here beneath the creaky rafters, cold and alone. Or had some of the others been here with her? Eleanor would never know.

  How had she been arrested? Something had gone terribly wrong in the field, and no one had survived to tell about it. Eleanor stared hard at the walls, as though willing Marie to speak through time. But the room remained still. Perhaps Marie herself had died not knowing.

  Or perhaps she had left some kind of clue. Eleanor scanned the room, looking for some sort of hiding place. She ran her hand along the paneled walls.

  “We searched it thoroughly, I assure you,” Henri said. Eleanor ignored him, continuing to feel along the floor, heedless of the dirt that blackened her hands. He didn’t know the girls the way she did, nor understand the way they would have operated to conceal things. Her hands ran over an uneven floorboard and she pried it up to reveal a hollow space. She looked up at Henri, whose face registered surprise in spite of itself. But the compartment was empty.

  She ran her hands along the edge of the bed frame, the rough lines where agents and other prisoners had carved things into the metal raised like scars. She knelt to examine it. Some had put tally marks as though counting off days, others their names. Believe, read a single word. She did not see Marie’s name. She moved to the next bed frame where she found a word written in familiar handwriting. “Baudelaire.” The French poet.

  Eleanor recalled the report of Marie’s recruitment, reading French poetry in a café. She walked to the bookshelf, scanning the titles that were mostly in French. She pulled out a book of French poetry and scanned the table of contents until she found a Baudelaire poem, “Fleurs du Mal.” Eleanor turned quickly to the page where the poem began. Sure enough, certain letters had been underlined faintly. She followed the pattern they spelled out: L-O-N-D-O-N. Marie had tried to signal something about headquarters, but what? Once it would have seemed a cry for help. But now, hearing the echo of Henri’s words, it seemed something altogether different: an accusation by Marie of those who had betrayed her and the other agents. Was she saying that someone in London was to blame?

  Shuddering, she closed the book, then looked up at Henri. “Earlier you said the blood was on my hands.” Henri seemed less angry than when they had first met, and she didn’t want to stir it all up again. But she had to know. “What did you mean?”

  “While I was working as a messenger, I often carried messages between here and Gestapo headquarters. The Germans were broadcasting to London so haphazardly. Why did no one notice and stop it? The Germans would not have been able to manage the radios on their own. They needed help, Miss Trigg. It had to be someone on your side. The way they were broadcasting and got the information so easily.” His voice was almost pleading now. “Somebody had to know.”

  “Is that why you came to find me?” Henri, it seemed, had not come to help her, but had been looking for answers of his own.

  “My brother was one of the resistance members taken in the sweeps right before D-Day, after Vesper circuit was broken. He never returned.”

  “I’m terribly sorry. But you can’t possibly blame us for that.”

  “It’s a funny thing, you asking about the girls,” he continued. “I mean, you were in charge of them all. And with your background, it well could have been you. Maybe you were the one who knew all along.”

  “Excuse me?” Heat rose to Eleanor’s cheeks. “You can’t possibly think...” He was suggesting that not just London, but Eleanor personally, had sold out her girls. “I didn’t betray them.” But failing them was almost as bad. “I have to go,” Eleanor said, suddenly needing to be away from Henri Duquet and his accusations. She fled down the stairs and from the house on Avenue Foch, ran without stopping down the rue. She looked back, relieved to see that Henri had not followed her.

  Turning the corner, she slowed to a walk. It was dark now, streetlights casting yellow pools on the pavement. Eleanor’s mind reeled. A betrayal at headquarters. The idea was almost unthinkable. But Vesper had suggested as much when he said he couldn’t trust anyone in London with his suspicions for fear of a leak. And Marie had seemed to signal it in her last desperate message in the poetry book. Eleanor pictured the meetings at Norgeby House, the inner circle that so carefully planned for the agents in the field. Could one of them possibly be the traitor?

  Eleanor neared the Arc de Triomphe. A lone cab was parked at the stand by Rue de Presbourg, and she climbed in and asked for The Savoy. If someone at headquarters had betrayed the girls, that would explain how they had been caught so neatly, one after another, their drop boxes and safe houses compromised. It might explain, too, why someone would have wanted Norgeby House and all of its records burned.

  She reached the safety of her hotel room and sank down into a chair. Henri had confirmed that the radios were played back to London. But she still didn’t know how the SD had been able to pull it off. They had to have had some sort of help. She had always known, of course, that her failure to push harder had stopped them from finding out before it was too late. But the idea that she had intentionally betrayed the girls cut through her like a knife. She was no closer to finding her answers than before.

  On the chair in her room sat the newspaper Henri had been reading in the bar. She picked it up and scanned the story about the war crimes trial in Germany. She was surprised the French newspaper had given it such prominence; there had been so many they had become commonplace. But this one was different; the defendant was an SD officer who had terrorized northern France for months. Hans Kriegler. Kriegler had been the head of SD—and quite possibly the architect of F Section’s downfall. She saw Kriegler’s face in the files of Norgeby House, details of his sadistic treatment of prisoners.

  Eleanor’s grip on the paper tightened. Kriegler was alive and he was about to go on trial. Surely he knew Marie’s fate—and the identity of her betrayer.

  Eleanor was going to Germany to find out.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Marie

  France, 1944

  Marie looked up from the hard concrete floor of Fresnes prison through a foggy haze, trying to focus. Her head pounded and her mouth was parched with thirst. There, to her amazement, stood Eleanor.

  “Eleanor...” How had she found her? Eleanor held out a canteen and Marie drank from it, cool, fresh water splashing carelessly out the sides of her mouth as she gulped it down.

  Marie bowed her head, feeling the ache of the fresh, unhealed wounds at the base of her neck where it met her back. “I failed you,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Get dressed. I’m taking you home.”

  The image faded as Mari
e’s eyes opened. She reached her hand out, closing it around the emptiness before her. Eleanor was not there. Pain assaulted her as she realized where she was, and all that had happened to bring her here. The morning after the interrogation at Avenue Foch, she had been taken from the attic room and transported unceremoniously to the prison. She didn’t know where they had taken Julian, what they had done with his body.

  That was nearly a month ago. The dream of Eleanor rescuing her and bringing her home to her daughter was one she had almost every night since.

  It was shouting that had roused her from sleep. “Raus!” voices barked. Not the usual French of the milice who ran Fresnes prison, but German. Something hard clanged against the metal bars of each cell as the doors opened.

  Marie sat up quickly. What was happening? For a fleeting second, she wondered if they were being liberated. The invasion had come since her imprisonment, she’d learned, Allied troops inching toward Paris. But the faces around her were grim, pupils dark and dilated with fear. Throughout the large cell, emaciated women were gathering their few belongings, writing notes on tiny scraps of paper. One was feverishly attempting to swallow a piece of jewelry she had managed to keep. These were the last preparations each woman had rehearsed hundreds of times in her mind, knowing this day would come. The rumors they had heard of the prison being emptied were true.

  Marie rose stiffly. She had been one of the last arrivals to the cell, and there were no more thin, straw mattresses left for her to sleep on. She had instead spent more than three weeks sleeping on the floor. She had consoled herself by thinking she might avoid nits by not lying on one of the filthy pallets. But it was inevitable with too many people in such a small space. Her scalp itched now with the tiny bugs, and she scratched her head, disgusted.

  She watched the women scurry about, making the only preparations for deportation that they could, as though it would change anything at all. About a dozen in all, they had been here longer than she, and their bodies were skeletal, covered with sores from the bedbugs and bruises from where they had been beaten. Marie had come to learn that they were all French, resistance members and spouses of partisans, and ordinary women who had been caught helping to defy the Germans. Very few were Jews; those poor souls had already been sent east, but their presence lingered in the makeshift mezuzah one had scratched into the wall near the door.