The Lost Girls of Paris

by Pam Jenoff

  “She survived SD interrogation and Fresnes prison. Tough as nails, in the end, and damn lucky.”

  Joy surged within Eleanor, but it was quickly replaced by anger. The Director had known and had not told her. “What did you tell her? About the arrests, I mean.”

  A look flickered across the Director’s face. “I told her nothing.”

  She couldn’t believe anything he said anymore. “Where is she?”

  “Leave her alone. Let her move on with her life.”

  But Marie was the one person who knew that Eleanor had nothing to do with betraying the girls. She was the only one who could corroborate the truth about what happened to the Vesper circuit. “The address.” She could tell from his expression that he was going to refuse. “Or I will leave here and go directly to Parliament.” She held out her hand.

  He started to argue, then turned wearily to the file cabinet behind him. He pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to her. “Eleanor, I’m sorry.” She took it from him, not responding.

  Then she tucked the paper in her bag and began the last leg of her journey.

  * * *

  It was almost eight thirty on a Tuesday morning when Eleanor stood in the center of Grand Central, waiting anxiously. Before leaving England, she had wired Marie: “Coming to America and I need your help. Please meet me at the information kiosk in Grand Central on February 12 at 8:30 a.m.”

  Eleanor stood uncertainly in the center of the station now, suitcase in hand. The flight had been a hot, noisy affair, making stops in Shannon, Gander and Boston before finally reaching New York. She’d arrived by plane the previous night and taken a room by the airport. As the hands on the clock reached half past eight, she looked around anxiously. She had arranged the neutral meeting point rather than going to the address the Director had given her, fearing it would be too much.

  Five minutes passed, then ten. Why hadn’t Marie shown? Had she not received the message? The message the Director had given her might have been outdated or wrong. Or perhaps she was angry at Eleanor for what she thought Eleanor had done, and was refusing to meet her at all.

  Eleanor set down her suitcase, which had grown heavy, beneath a bench. She looked around the station, contemplating her options. There was a message board at the side of the round information kiosk, little bits of paper stuck to it. She walked closer. There were pictures of missing soldiers and refugees from families seeking information. There were notes, too, about meetings or missed meetings. She scanned the board, but did not see anything addressed to her.

  She stepped away from the message board, her heart sinking. It was nearly nine, well past the time she had asked Marie to meet her. There could be only one conclusion: Marie was not coming.

  She had to get to Marie. Eleanor reached into her purse and pulled out the slip of paper the Director had given her with Marie’s address, an apartment in Brooklyn. She could go there and ring the bell. But what if Marie didn’t want to see her? When she had learned Marie was alive, it was hope against everything she had known. To Eleanor, the notion that Marie was alive and unwilling to see or forgive her was unbearable.

  For a minute she looked around the station, wanting to give up. If Marie wouldn’t even see her, what point was there in going on?

  Then she squared her shoulders, steeling herself. She had to see Marie and explain what really happened. This was about more than Marie’s feelings or forgiveness; she needed Marie to help prove what had really happened during the war. With Marie’s help, they could bring the truth to light about the betrayal that had killed so many of her girls.

  She would go to Marie’s flat, Eleanor decided, and insist that she listen. She started across the station.

  Outside the station, she paused to get her bearings. She looked at the passersby, wanting to ask someone for directions. She approached a group of commuters waiting near a bus stop. “Excuse me,” she said to a man who was reading the paper. But he did not seem to hear. As she turned to find someone else, she spied a phone booth at the corner. Perhaps the operator might have a number for Marie.

  Eleanor crossed the street to the phone booth. Then she faltered; perhaps it was best just to go find Marie, rather than calling and giving her a chance to say no. She stood indecisively, caught between the phone booth and the bus station. As she turned back toward the bus station, something across the street caught her eye. A flash of blond hair above a burgundy print scarf, like the one Marie had worn the first day she came to Norgeby House.

  She had come after all! Eleanor’s heart began to pound. “Marie!” Eleanor called, starting back across the street. The woman started to turn around and Eleanor stepped hopefully toward her. There was a loud honking of a car’s horn, which seemed to grow to a roar, and Eleanor turned, too late, to see the vehicle barreling toward her. She raised her hands in a protective gesture. She heard a deafening screech of the brakes, felt an explosion of white pain.

  And then she knew no more.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Grace

  New York, 1946

  Grace gasped as the door to the apartment opened. “Marie Roux?”

  The woman’s eyes flickered. Her eyes bore a bit of fear, but something more...resignation. “Yes.”

  For a moment, Grace was frozen with disbelief. She had spent so much of the last few weeks seeing Marie’s image, first in the weathered photograph and later, after she had returned it, in her mind’s eye. Now the woman was standing before her, come to life. There were little changes since the photo had been taken, faint lines around the mouth and eyes. Her cheeks were a bit more sunken and the hair around her temples bore strains of premature gray, as if she had aged lifetimes in a few short years.

  “Who are you?” the woman asked. Her English accent, refined but not overly posh, was exactly as Grace had imagined.

  Grace faltered, unsure how to explain her role in the affair. “I’m Grace Healey. I found some photographs and I thought...” She stopped and pulled out the lone photo she’d kept.

  “Oh!” Marie brought her hand to her mouth. “That was Josie.”

  “May I come in?” Grace interjected gently.

  Marie looked up. “Please do.” She ushered Grace inside and led her to a small sofa. The apartment, no larger than Grace’s own room at the boardinghouse, was clean and bright, but the furnishings were spare and there were no photographs or other mementos adorning it. There was a door at the rear and through the opening she could see a tiny bedroom. Grace wondered if Marie hadn’t been here long or, like herself with her own flat, simply hadn’t made the place into her home.

  Marie held up the photograph. “Is this the only one?”

  “There were others, including yours, but I left them at the British consulate. I’ve been trying to get these photos returned to the right person,” Grace explained. “Is that you?”

  “I don’t know.” Marie looked genuinely uncertain. “I suppose I’m the only one left.”

  How? Grace wanted to ask. Marie had been listed among those killed as part of Nacht und Nebel. But the question seemed too intrusive. “Can you tell me what happened during the war?” she asked instead.

  “You know that I was an agent for SOE?” Marie asked. Grace nodded. “I was recruited by a woman called Eleanor Trigg, because I spoke French well.” Grace considered interrupting Marie to tell her about Eleanor, then decided against it. “After training, I was dropped into northern France to work as a radio operator for a part of F Section called the Vesper circuit.” Marie had a lyrical, looping style of speech and it was not hard to imagine her speaking fluently in French. “Our leader was a man called Julian. We blew up a bridge before D-Day in order to make things harder for the Germans.

  “But somehow our cell was compromised and we were all arrested, or at least Julian and I were. They shot Julian.” Marie’s face crumbled at this last part, and she almost seemed to relive
it as she remembered. Grace’s heart ached for this poor woman, who had been through so much. “I was interrogated in Paris, then sent to prison. I found Josie again there, but she was too far gone to make it.” The grief in her words poured forth, as though she had never shared it before with anyone.

  “Josie was another agent?”

  Marie dabbed at her eyes. “And my dearest friend. We were put on a train, bound for one of the camps. Josie managed to detonate a grenade and blow up the railcar. After the explosion, I lost consciousness. I awoke weeks later in a barn. The Germans had missed me, or left me for dead. A German farmer found me under the railcar rubble and hid me. I stayed there until I was strong enough. By then, the invasion had come so I found a British unit and told them who I was.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I went home. My train arrived at King’s Cross. There was no one to meet me. I wasn’t expecting a parade; no one knew that I was coming. So I went and collected my daughter, Tess. We boarded a boat for America straightaway.”

  “So you never went back to SOE?”

  “Only once. I asked the Director for help expediting our papers to get to America. There was no one left. Eleanor had been dismissed. The others were all gone.”

  There was a sudden clattering at the door to the apartment and a girl of not more than eight walked in. “Mummy!” she said with just a hint of an English accent, throwing herself into her mother’s outstretched arms.

  Then she pulled back to look questioningly at Grace. “You must be Tess,” Grace offered. The child looked so much like her mother that Grace had to smile. “And I’m...” She faltered, not sure how to explain her presence here to the girl.

  “A friend,” Marie finished for her.

  Tess seemed satisfied with the explanation. “Mum, my friend Esther in apartment 5J invited me over to play and stay for dinner. May I go?”

  “Be home by seven,” Marie replied. “And give me one more hug first.” Tess folded herself into her mother’s outstretched arms for a fleeting second, then bolted for the door. “I’ll never take for granted getting to see her every day,” Marie said to Grace when Tess had gone.

  Marie stood up. “I have more photos,” she added, shifting topics abruptly. She walked to an armoire and pulled out a yellowed album. She handed it over hesitantly. Unlike the staid photographs that Eleanor had possessed, these were candid shots and they played out like a movie of the time the circuit had spent together. There was a snapshot of young men playing rugby in a field, another of a group around a table drinking wine. They might have been at Oxford or Cambridge, not on a mission in France. “The boys, they took photos on the tiny little camera we’d been given during training. I pulled the film off Julian that last day. And I kept it in places they would never think to look. Only when I reached America did I have it developed.”

  “Wasn’t it dangerous to take these?”

  She shrugged. “Certainly. But it’s so very hard to explain what those months in the field were like. It was worth the risk. Someone needed to know.”

  In case none of them made it, Grace thought. She imagined the loneliness and terror, how much these bits of camaraderie must have meant. “That’s Julian?” Grace asked.

  “Yes. And Will beside him, always. You would not have known they were cousins,” Marie said. Two young men not more than twenty or so. One was fair, with a smattering of freckles and a quick smile. The other was tall with sharp cheekbones and dark, piercing eyes. In another picture, he looked down lovingly at Marie. “He seemed fond of you,” Grace observed.

  “Yes,” Marie said quickly, seeming almost embarrassed. “He loved me,” Marie said, her voice full with emotion. “And I, him. I suppose it seems strange that our feelings developed so quickly in such a short time,” she added.

  “Not at all,” Grace replied.

  “I watched him die,” Marie added. “Held him in my arms. It was all I could do.”

  “That must have been terrible.” Grace reflected on how awful it had been, losing Tom. But to have witnessed it, as Marie had, would have been unbearable. “And his cousin, Will?”

  “I honestly don’t know. He was supposed to fly back to France and pick me up, but I was arrested. I tried to find out what became of him before I left London. But he had disappeared.” Her face was grave, and Grace could tell the mystery of what had become of Will haunted her as much as losing Julian and Josie.

  “When was all of this?”

  “May of 1944.”

  “Just weeks before D-Day.”

  “We did not last to see it.” The work that Vesper circuit had done blowing up rail lines and arming maquisards had surely stopped many German troops from reaching Normandy and the other beaches faster. They saved the lives of hundreds if not thousands of Allied troops who might have had the Germans there waiting for them. But most never knew the difference they had made.

  “We were betrayed,” Marie said bluntly. “When I was arrested and taken to Avenue Foch, they had one of our radios and they forced me to broadcast back to London. I tried to omit my true check, the code I was supposed to give to verify my identity, in order to signal to London that something was amiss. But they ignored my signal—in fact, they broadcast back that I had left it out, which was what ultimately caused the Germans to shoot Julian. It was as if the British knew the radio was compromised but wanted to keep transmitting anyway.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have betrayed you?” Grace asked. She dreaded telling Marie that it had been Eleanor, and half hoped she might already know or have guessed.

  “Before leaving London, I asked Colonel Winslow—he was the Director of SOE, Eleanor’s boss. At first he tried to deny that there was any betrayal at headquarters at all. But when I confronted him with everything I knew from the field, he suggested that it was Eleanor. He showed me a memo from Eleanor’s desk that ordered the radio transmissions to keep going even after London knew the broadcasts had been intercepted.” Marie’s eyes filled with tears. “I could hardly imagine it. It didn’t make sense.”

  “So you didn’t believe it was Eleanor?”

  Marie shook her head emphatically. “No, never. Not in a million years.” Grace was puzzled. Marie herself had seen the document, which seemed to implicate Eleanor. Was Marie so blinded by loyalty? “Why not?”

  “When I saw Julian for the last time at SD headquarters, he had just returned from London, where he’d seen Eleanor. He told me before he died that Eleanor had been worried about the radios. She specifically worried that there was something wrong with the transmissions and warned me to be careful. Of course, by then it was too late. But she tried to warn me. That’s how I know she wasn’t behind it.”

  “But if not her, then who?”

  “I don’t know. Colonel Winslow told me to go to America and find a fresh start, to not look back. So I did. I sent him my address as he asked and he sends a stipend check monthly. I thought I had put it all behind me. At least until the message from Eleanor came.” Marie walked to a closet and opened it to reveal the suitcase Grace had last seen in Grand Central.

  Grace was stunned. “You had it all along.”

  “Eleanor had wired me that she was coming to New York.”

  “How did she find you?”

  “The Director, I’d imagine. He knew I was coming to New York and had arranged the paperwork. It wouldn’t be so very hard to find me. And Eleanor was very good.” Grace nodded. Finally she understood why Eleanor had come to New York. “In her telegram, Eleanor asked me to meet her at Grand Central. Part of me didn’t want to see her,” Marie added. “It was a very painful chapter of my life and I had put it away forever—or so I thought.”

  “So you didn’t go to meet her?”

  “No, I went. I couldn’t stay away. The telegram asked me to meet her at eight thirty. But my daughter, Tess, got sick and was home from school. It was after nine o’
clock by the time I could get someone to watch her so I could make it to the station, and by then Eleanor wasn’t there. I figured she would try to contact me again. Eleanor was very persistent that way. But I couldn’t find her, so I left. Later that day, when I learned what had happened, I went back.”

  “That’s when you took the suitcase.”

  “Yes. I had seen it there that morning, but didn’t get close enough to notice that it belonged to Eleanor. Only later, after I heard the news, did I put two plus two together and realized it was hers. After what happened, I couldn’t just leave it there.”

  “Do you mind if I look inside her suitcase?”

  Marie shook her head. “I haven’t opened it yet. I couldn’t bear to.”

  Grace laid the suitcase down on its side and undid the clasp. Inside, Eleanor’s belongings remained neat, untouched. Grace scanned the contents, taking care not to disturb them. At the back, nearly buried, was a pair of white baby shoes.

  “Those are mine,” Marie said suddenly, reaching for them. “That is, they belonged to my daughter. Eleanor had no children. But she had these for my safekeeping.”

  “So she brought them with her for sentimental value?”

  Marie smiled. “Eleanor had no sentiment. She did everything with purpose.” She turned the shoes upside down and as she did, a metal chain fell out of one of them. Marie retrieved it from the floor. “My necklace.” She held up a chain with a butterfly locket. “Eleanor kept it safe for me after all.” She batted back tears as she secured the necklace around her neck. Then she studied the baby shoes again, a look of realization spreading across her face. She started working at the bottom of one of the soles with practiced fingers. “Shoes are some of the best hiding places.”

  Inside the heel was a tiny piece of paper. Marie unfolded it carefully and showed it to Grace. It was a mimeograph of the order Grace had found in the file. Grace reached into the suitcase to see what else Eleanor might have brought. She pulled out a small notebook. “She always had a notebook,” Marie remarked, smiling at the memory.