The Lost Girls of Paris

by Pam Jenoff

  Wiping the tears from her eyes, she started from the vault.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Grace

  New York, 1946

  Grace poured sugar into her coffee, watching it disappear into the blackness below. She looked up, taking comfort in the sight of Frankie hunched over a file across the office and the uneven hum of the radiator.

  It had been a full week since she’d left the photos at the British consulate. She’d wondered if it would be hard to go back to normal, as if the whole business with the girls had never happened. But she had slipped back into her old life like a comfortable pair of shoes. The room at the boardinghouse, now graced by her mother’s plastic hydrangeas, felt more like home than ever.

  Still, she often thought about Mark and how puzzled he must have been to wake up and find her gone. She’d half expected him to call, but there had been silence. She thought about the girls, too, and about Eleanor and why she had betrayed them.

  Pushing aside the questions that had sent her on the crazy quest in the first place, Grace resumed typing a letter to the housing board. Frankie crossed the room and handed her a file. “I was hoping you could fill this out for me.” She opened the file. There were papers from the Children’s Aid Society for the placement of a child with a family. Grace was surprised; usually they referred these types of matters to Simon Wise, over on Ludlow, who specialized in family law. But then Grace saw the names on the form and she understood why Frankie was handling this one. The child to be fostered was Samuel Altshuler. And he was being placed with none other than Frankie himself.

  “You’re taking Sammy in?” she asked, almost not believing.

  “The kid deserves a solid home, you know? And what you said about it being hard to get involved, that really stuck.” Grace’s mind reeled back to their conversation over the phone when she was in Washington. She had said it as a caution. But he had taken it the other way and jumped in with both feet. “So I’m going to take him. At least if they’ll let an old bachelor have a kid.”

  She reached out and squeezed his arm, her admiration soaring. “They will, Frankie. They definitely will. He’s the luckiest kid to have you. I’ll get these typed right away and I’ll deliver them to the agency myself.”

  It was nearly two o’clock that afternoon when Grace returned from the courthouse. The office was empty, but Frankie had scribbled a note: “Gone to get some things for the kid’s new room. Back soon.” His words seemed to crackle off the page with excitement and purpose.

  Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she had missed lunch. She picked up the bag containing her egg salad sandwich and started for the door. Time for a quick bite on the roof before Frankie returned.

  She opened the door to the office, then stopped short. There, in the corridor, stood Mark.

  “Hello...” she said uncertainly. Their encounter on the street last time had been a coincidence. Now he had come here purposefully, looking for her. Surprise and happiness and anger seemed to rush through her all at once. How had he found her? Her mother, or her landlady perhaps; it would not have been that hard.

  “You left,” he said, his voice more wounded than accusing.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Was it something I said? Or did?”

  “Not at all.” She could see how confused he must have been. “Things between us just felt, well, complicated. And then I found this.” She reached in her bag and pulled out the wireless transmission that proved Eleanor’s guilt. She had almost destroyed it after returning to New York. But she hadn’t, and despite trying to put the whole matter behind her, she kept the paper with her. “Finding out the truth about Eleanor, plus everything between us, it was just more than I could take. I was overwhelmed.”

  “So you left.”

  “I left.” But running away had changed nothing. Eleanor’s guilt was still there, plain on the page. And so were her feelings for Mark. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything.”

  “It’s okay. All of us have things that we keep hidden. There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” He paused. “When we were in Washington you asked about my time with the War Crimes Tribunal. I wasn’t ready to talk about it then, but I am now. You see, I was finishing up law school when the war broke out. I wanted to enlist, but my father insisted I take a deferment and finish school before going abroad. He’d banked everything on my school and my being a lawyer was needed to keep us afloat. So I doubled my classes to finish early. I enlisted the day after graduation and they put me in the JAG corps and deployed me. But by then it was all over, just the cleanup.

  “One of the first cases I faced in Frankfurt was the Obens trial. Have you heard of it?” Grace shook her head. “I didn’t think so. They worked hard to keep it out of the papers. Obens was an American GI in one of the companies that liberated Ravensbrück. He and the others were sick with what they had seen, not right in the head. When they captured a German who had been a guard at the camp, Obens shot him, in cold blood, and in violation of the rules of war.” Grace blanched, imagining good men just like Tom, only too far gone. “I wanted to prosecute the matter. It wasn’t combat—it was murder, pure and simple. But my superiors would hear none of it. They were only focused on trying Germans and they didn’t want to dilute the story of the Allied victory.

  “I wouldn’t leave it alone. So they came up with a story about how I was doing it because my family was German.” She recalled his surname: Dorff. Some part of her had known he was of German descent, but she hadn’t wanted to ask. “They called it treason.”

  “So you resigned?”

  “Before they could court-martial me, yes. You must think I’m a coward. I’m sorry for not telling you sooner.”

  “No, I think what you did was brave. But why are you telling me now?”

  “Because I think you blame yourself for Tom’s death and that’s why you keep running. But none of it is black-and-white. Not your choices, not my choices and not Eleanor’s either. I’m sure there were reasons for what she did.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I don’t know what to believe anymore. But I’m awfully glad you’re here.” The words came out before she realized she was saying them. She could feel her cheeks flush.

  “Really?” He took a step closer. “Me, too.”

  “Even if it’s complicated?”

  “Especially then. I’m not here for easy.”

  He wrapped her in his arms then and they stood motionless for several seconds. She looked up and their eyes met. He looked as though he might kiss her and this time she really, truly wanted him to. She closed her eyes as his head lowered. Their lips met.

  There was a noise behind them. “Grace, would you believe I got Sammy a bike and...” Frankie’s voice trailed off as Mark and Grace broke apart, too late.

  Grace cleared her throat. “Frankie, this is Mark Dorff. He was a friend of my husband’s.” The explanation just seemed to make things worse.

  She watched as Frankie looked from her to Mark, then back again, braced for what he was going to say. She could not tell from his expression if he was angry or amused.

  “I wasn’t expecting you back so soon,” she offered.

  “Yeah, well, remember that woman you asked me to check on?” Frankie looked uneasily at Mark, as if unsure he should speak in front of him.

  “It’s okay. Mark knows everything.”

  “I was over at immigration earlier, checking on some things for Sammy’s adoption papers. I saw my buddy at customs. He found her entry file.”

  “Eleanor’s?”

  “There wasn’t much to it. She came to America a day or two before she died, arrived by plane.”

  Grace nodded, her heart sinking again. She knew that much from the passport she’d seen at the consulate. What had she expected, really? A customs form could hardly tell what ha
d gone on inside Eleanor’s mind, what she was doing in New York and whether it related to her betrayal of the girls. “Thank you,” she said to Frankie, still grateful for his efforts to help her.

  “The only other thing in the file was this.” He pulled a small tablet from his jacket and opened it, pointing at the notation he had made. “This was the address she listed as her destination in America.” Grace scanned the entry. Her spine began to tingle. An apartment in Brooklyn. And below it, in Frankie’s chicken-scratch writing, the entry from the log: “Person(s) receiving.” As she read the name he’d scribbled below it, her blood ran cold.

  “I have to go,” Grace said, reaching for her bag. “Thank you!” She kissed Frankie so hard on the cheek that he fell back in his chair.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Mark called after her.

  But Grace was already out the door. There were some things a woman had to do alone.

  Chapter Thirty

  Eleanor

  London, 1946

  “Eleanor.” The Director looked up from his desk. It had been four days since she’d left Zurich. She stood unannounced in the door to his office now, paper in hand. “I wasn’t expecting you back so soon. How was your trip to France?”

  “In France, I found nothing.”

  He leaned back in his chair and reached for his pipe. “Well, that’s too bad. I’m grateful to you for trying, but we always knew it might be a wild goose chase with nothing to come of it after so much time. Hopefully it has at least put some of your questions to rest.”

  “I didn’t say nothing came of it,” she interjected. “I said I found nothing in France. But then I had the opportunity to go to Germany and interview Hans Kriegler.”

  “Germany.” The Director paused, unlit pipe dangling in midair. “Kriegler’s being tried at Nuremberg, isn’t he? How did you ever manage that?”

  “I managed. I was able to speak with him at Dachau, where he was being held, before he was transported. He led me to this.” She held out the document from the vault. “You knew that the Germans had the radio set. And yet you kept broadcasting classified information.”

  He took the paper from her. “Eleanor, that’s preposterous!” he blustered, a beat too quickly before reading it. “I’ve never seen this document before in my life.”

  She held out her hand. But it wasn’t the return of the paper she was seeking. “The transmission log. Let me see it. And don’t tell me it was lost in the fire,” she added, before he could respond. “I know you kept a copy of your own.” The Director regarded her unflinchingly. Then his expression changed to one of resignation. He turned to the file cabinet behind him, dialed the combination of the safe lock and twisted the handle. The drawer popped open and he handed the thick file to her.

  Eleanor thumbed through the pages and pages of transmissions between London and F Section, organized by date. Then she came to it, a copy of the transmission she’d gotten from Kriegler. London had received it after all. It was identical to the paper Kriegler had given her, except for the received stamp—and the second sheet of paper stapled behind it. “Message not authenticated,” the second sheet said, a warning flag from the operator who had received the message. And then a separate notion: “Continue transmissions.” Someone had issued a directive to keep transmitting despite the warning that the message was a fraud. And though she had never seen it in her life, the memorandum had been printed on Eleanor’s own letterhead.

  “You kept this from me.”

  “I didn’t include you,” he corrected. As if that made a difference. She had kept transmitting, unaware that the concerns she had raised over and over to the Director had in fact been substantiated to SOE by the Germans themselves. But her superiors, the Director and God knew who else, had kept the information from her so that they could keep transmitting. And it had gotten the girls arrested, cost them their lives. She had long suspected something was wrong, that the broadcasts were not authentic. But the notion that her own agency would willingly sacrifice its own people was staggering.

  “You knew that if I saw this, I would stop the transmissions altogether. You should have stopped the transmissions. You were broadcasting to the Germans, sensitive information that put all of our agents at risk.”

  He stood up. “I had no choice. I was acting on orders.” How many times had she read that in the reports of captured German war criminals, who said they were powerless, that they had no choice but to commit the atrocities by their own hands? Then the Director sat up straighter. “But even if that were not the case, I still would have done it. When we realized that the Germans had the radio, it was an opportunity to feed them information about operations—false information that would redirect their defenses elsewhere ahead of D-Day. And it worked—surely if the Germans hadn’t thought we were amassing forces elsewhere, Allied casualties would have been much worse. If that blasted radio operator hadn’t flagged the message that was supposed to be from Tompkins, it would have kept working. It worked,” he repeated, as if to convince himself.

  “Not for my girls,” Eleanor replied sharply. “Not for the twelve who never came home, or for the other agents like Julian who were killed.” The information London had fed to the Germans over the radio had revealed their locations and activities, led directly to their capture.

  “Sometimes a few must be sacrificed for the greater good,” he said coldly.

  Eleanor was dumbfounded. She had worked for the Director; supported him. The strategic way he approached the difficult work they’d had to do, deploying agents like chess pieces on a board, was one of the things she respected most about him. She had never imagined him to be like this, though: cold, cynical. “This is outrageous. I’m going to Whitehall.”

  “And tell them what? It was a covert program, wholly sanctioned. Where do you think authorization came from in the first place?” It had not just been the Director, but the highest levels of government that had approved the plan. She saw then the full extent of the betrayal.

  “I’ll go to the newspapers.” Something had to be done.

  “Eleanor, have you stopped to think of your own role in the affair? You knew that the transmissions were suspicious. Yet you continued to transmit the information over the same frequencies to the same operator.”

  Eleanor was stunned. “You can’t be suggesting...”

  “You even sent the message signaling that Julian would be returning to the field. And when the operator said to switch landing fields, you okayed that as well. You sent Julian to his death, Eleanor. You didn’t press harder because you knew on many levels that no matter what, the mission had to go forward.”

  “How dare you?” Eleanor felt her cheeks go red with anger. “I never would have done anything to jeopardize Julian—or my girls.”

  But the Director continued, “And make no mistake about it. Your name is on all of the outgoing transmissions. If that gets out, the world will know that you are to blame.

  “I never wanted it to come to this.” The Director’s voice softened. “I thought it was all in the past when you left SOE. But you couldn’t leave well enough alone. And then that business with Violet’s father. He brought his questions to his MP and they said there was to be a parliamentary inquiry. I sent off the files I could to Washington.”

  “And burned the rest,” she said. He did not reply. The truth was almost too awful to believe—the Director had destroyed Norgeby House, the very place they had worked so hard to build, to bury the truth forever. “You sent me off, too,” she added slowly as the realization came to her.

  “I kept receiving reports of you asking questions,” he admitted. “You wouldn’t leave it alone. I thought getting you out of London, sending you to look into things in France, would buy time.” He hadn’t counted on her getting to Germany and speaking with Kriegler. But she had, and the things she learned had changed everything.

  “So what are w
e going to do about it?” she asked.

  “There is nothing to be done. Parliament will conduct its investigation and find nothing and it will all go away.”

  “What do you mean? We have to let the truth be known, tell Parliament.”

  “For what, so they can further denigrate the work we did at SOE? They’ve always said we were inconsequential, even damaging, and we are to give them proof to support it? SOE is my legacy and yours, too.” He would do anything to keep that intact. “The truth changes nothing, Eleanor. The girls are gone.”

  But to her, the truth had to prevail.

  “Then I’ll go myself.” The words were an echo of the threat she had made when she suspected the radios. If she had made good on it then and followed through, some of the girls might be alive today. But she hadn’t. The threat this time was not a hollow one. She had nothing left to lose. “I’ll go to the commission myself.”

  “You can’t. It’s your word against mine. Who do you think they’ll believe—a disgruntled former secretary, or the decorated colonel who headed the agency with distinction?” He was right. She just as easily might have betrayed the girls. There was simply no truth to contradict him.

  Unless there was a witness. “Kriegler said one of the girls never made it to the concentration camp where the others perished. That she might still be alive. Do you know anything about that?”

  An uneasy look crossed the Director’s face. “I received a visit from one of the girls not long after the war. She wanted help expediting a visa to the States. I helped her because it seemed like the right thing to do.”

  More likely he was happy to send her as far away as possible. “Which one was it?” Eleanor asked.

  “The one you never thought could do the job, oddly enough. And ironically, the one whose transmissions were being faked by the Germans—Marie Roux.”

  She brought her hand to her mouth. What Kriegler had told her was true.