Page 1 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

Uncatchable

Aix-en-Provence, France, July 1944

I hear their boots first. Ack-ack-ack, like machine guns firing in the stairwell. Then the roar: “Gestapo! Aufmachen! ”

That’s when I remember—I forgot to lock the door.

I’ve run so often these past four years that I think I can make it; that if I fling the bolt into place, I’ll have time to escape out the back. And I do make it. The bolt is in my hands, but the door is bulging from the force of the bodies trying to break in, and my fingers are hysterical with adrenaline and can’t make the lock catch.

The wood cracks. The door shudders.

It flies open.

Two dozen Nazis burst in.

This is the moment everyone in London warned me was coming. Capture. Torture. Death—but only if I’m lucky.

In front of me is a wall of submachine guns and menace. I should back away, far away, but my feet are ready to charge straight through the guns and out the door and toward my three children so I can hold their innocence and their love right up against my body for what could be the very last time.

It’s not his intention, but a plainclothes gestapiste saves me from that mad act. He demands, “Where’s the man?” rousing me back to sense.

The man . He’s here for one of my three thousand agents, then. Not me. Not yet.

Which means I have to take hold of myself, become the name on my papers: Germaine Pezet, a provincial housewife. Hérisson, the little hedgehog I take my code name from, must scuttle away. If this performance is anything less than my best, they’ll find the agent they’re looking for. And I’ll never see my children again. Or Léon.

Where are you, Léon? Please God, let me find him.

The gestapiste ’s gun clicks. I make myself step toward it, cackling.

“Where’s the man? Oh, please find me a man. With a face like mine, they’re in short supply.” I gesture to my jutting chin, thankful that I let MI6’s dentist make me a prosthetic disguise to alter my face so completely that I’m unrecognizable as the woman on the Wanted posters who leads the Alliance network.

It’s the only weapon I have, so I wield it, winking at the Nazi and pointing to a cupboard where, six days ago, stacks of documents couriered across France from my agents were hiding. “Perhaps he’s in the armoire.”

When the soldiers fling open the armoire, they find nothing. All the papers stashed there have long since been coded and sent to London.

I expel adrenaline with another cackle. “Make sure he’s a good one.”

The leader glowers. But doubt flickers in his eyes like the match I hold to a nonchalant cigarette and I start to hope: Maybe I’ll get away with it. Perhaps I won’t even be taken to prison this time but will be overlooked as an ugly peasant woman who has nothing whatsoever in common with so-called beautiful spy Marie-Madeleine.

The Nazis fan through the apartment, probably hunting for Lucien, head of my Provencal sector, who was here earlier, both of us part of a network the Germans call Noah’s Ark because of our animal code names. Probably also hunting for the stack of intelligence reports Lucien delivered, which is sitting in plain sight on the table.

I inhale smoke, exhale fear. I have to hide those papers. But there are five machine guns still trained on me. I leer stupidly, call out, “I prefer brown hair. Brown eyes, too.”

Léon’s eyes are gray-green jasper. Forever, I told him the last time I saw him, ten months ago.

Thankfully, my guards join the search, leaving just one SS officer in the room. The second his attention shifts to his companions, who have the fun of hunting out Resistance quarry rather than the bad luck to be stuck with me, I snort revoltingly into a handkerchief. The guard shudders, turns his back, and I leap forward, scoop up the papers, and toss them under the sofa just before the plainclothes gestapiste returns.

“Have you seen a tall man with fair hair? He’s part of a network of terrorists. We were told he’d been here.” The officer speaks politely, but I know this is the moment before his temper breaks.

I have to stop it from breaking on me.

I heave my shoulders into a witless shrug. “The only blonds here are your soldiers.”

“Then why did you try to bar the door against us?” he shouts.

Spittle and frustration punctuate the air like angry stars.

My hands tremble.

I shove them in my pockets, cast a sly eye at the furious Nazi. “If I’d known you were all so handsome, I’d have flung the door wide open—and my chastity belt, too.”

I want to be sick. The gestapiste wants to hit me. But his soldiers have found nothing. He hits the table instead.

I swallow, breathe, swallow again as, miraculously, incredibly, the Nazis shoulder their guns and walk away from the leader of the largest Resistance network in France.

Two minutes more and I can drop to my knees on the floor.

But…

One of them sweeps the room a final time and, as if the devil has control of them, his eyes fall to the space beneath the sofa where piles of coded messages wait like traitors. Now I do almost drop to my knees and cry out that deaf and futile word, Non!

“ Lügnerin! ” the Nazi screams as he pulls out fistfuls of paper.

Liar.

Now I stumble. I’m so tired, don’t think I can do this anymore. Defend myself and my agents, pretend and perform, rescue myself every time. Where’s the damn D’Artagnan the storybooks promise you, the rebel trickster who saves both the day and honor, too?

Six soldiers advance, machine guns pointing at my head, my chest, my throat. Others tear the sofa to pieces, the footstools, too, which are crammed with more intelligence reports. Rifle butts smash tables into splinters of bone.

The ringleader seizes me by the shoulders. “Who are you?” he rages, shaking me so viciously I’m terrified my prosthetic will fly out, revealing both my disguise and the answer to his question: I’m the woman you’ve been hunting since 1941.

I’m the D’Artagnan. And no matter how scared I am or how tired of fighting and mourning my murdered friends and the children I never see, I have to fight some more. There’s time for despair only when I’m lying alone in my bed at three in the morning and no one can see how I have to grip my hands between my knees to stop them from trembling.

I fling out my last-chance dice.

“I’m a spy,” I say, the guise of silly housewife lain aside, the self of Hérisson still hiding. “London sent me.”

The gestapiste tries to interrupt, but I keep talking the way Marie-Madeleine, the airplane-flying, car-rallying daredevil iconoclast, would have spoken five years ago.

“I’m the stag you catch when you were just out hunting rabbits. And I’ll only speak to the master of the house, not his gamekeeper. Find me the most senior Gestapo officer in Provence, rather than his underling,” I sneer.

My heart is a maniacal drumbeat. My common sense is screaming at me to find a better solution than to let them arrest me. But I need to get away from the guns. If I’m taken to a prison to await a Gestapo commandant I have no intention of facing—because a commandant will know exactly who I am, and he won’t be so kind as to shoot me—then maybe I can escape. Guns kill, but prisons can be escaped from; that’s a fact I’ve learned firsthand.

The officer frowns, worried. What if he lets his men kill me, but then discovers I had valuable information that could have been tortured out of me?

He pushes me toward the stairs. “The regional commandant will be in Aix-en-Provence tomorrow morning.”

The boneless relief of being allowed to live for a little longer almost makes me stumble again. But what hellish prison will they take me to? And how will I get away before I have to face a Gestapo commandant, or before they serve torture for breakfast?

I’m driven to the Miollis barracks and shoved into a punishment cell. The men occupying it are ordered out, leaving behind the stench of urine and sweat. I brace one hand against the wall, but it isn’t enough to ward off the stink and the terror, and three seconds later I’m retching into the bucket so violently that perspiration drenches my body and I want to claw my skin off my bones.

Empty and exhausted, I sag against the wall, close my eyes, draw on the memory of Béatrice’s and Christian’s faces the last time I saw them, over a year ago. I picture the tiny baby, Léon’s child, whom I had held for only a week before I had to give him up.

He will have just turned one.

How many more birthdays will I miss?

It’s the kind of question you should never ask yourself when you’re alone in a prison cell with a capsule of cyanide hidden in a locket around your neck. Not when the man you love is missing. Not when lives of your three thousand agents, as well as the freedom of your country, are at stake.

By morning, the Gestapo will have read enough of my papers to know who I am, and they’ll punish me in ways so cruel I can’t even imagine them. If I’m to swallow the cyanide MI6 gave me, it has to be now. Back in London, the priest told me that God would forgive me.

But will I forgive myself?

If nobody warns Lucien that the Gestapo are onto him, he’ll be captured. His sector, almost all that’s left of the Alliance network after the last brutal months, will be torn to shreds. And France, fighting with everything she has for her freedom now that the Allies have finally landed, will feel the Nazis’ guns press right into her skull.

So I pull myself up, remind myself that I’m a little hedgehog wearing a dress of spikes.

It’s five hours until dawn.

I start at the window. It’s up high, one meter wide and perhaps double that in height. No glass covers the opening, just a heavy wooden board with a gap at the top through which I can see thick metal bars.

A gap.

An opening.

A space where the light gets in.

My breath comes faster. I’m balancing on the thin line that exists between madness and hope when I shove the cot beneath the window and empty the bucket, gagging again from the stench.

I upturn the bucket on the cot.

In Shanghai, where I lived in the French concession as a child, my father told me about burglars who greased their bodies so they could slip easily into houses at night. It’s summer. The cell is an oven. My body is drenched in sweat. Rationing and running from Nazis for four years means I’m as thin as a needle.

But am I slick enough and thin enough to slide into the gap between the board and the bars and then through the bars to freedom?

I slip off my dress, grip it between my teeth. Then I climb onto the bucket, reach up to the window and try to believe that I’m like a ray of moonlight, able to crack open the darkness and pass through anything—uncatchable.