Page 11 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

10

It’s Time to Lose Ourselves

Pau, April–May 1941

Navarre gestures to an enormous pile of francs. “Five million,” he says, which can’t be true. “And a transmitter.” He points to a brown leather case with leads, dials, plugs, and sockets spilling from it.

“De Gaulle said no,” he goes on, when it becomes apparent that I’m speechless. “I told him our network would transmit all our information to him but had to keep its independence. He told me that whoever was not with him was against him.”

I should have known that Navarre and De Gaulle, two men I’d met arguing in a Parisian salon, would never come to terms. It’s a blow. Few people knew who Charles de Gaulle was in June 1940, but now that he’s in London, with the ear of Churchill and the leadership of the Free French, he’s become a rallying point for the small number of French people who want to work against the Nazis.

“Then how…” I indicate the goods and money.

Navarre does something I’ve never seen him do. He beams. “MI6. We’re part of the British intelligence services. They’re happy to help us without needing to control us. And we have a new name: Alliance.”

Now my smile matches Navarre’s . A name, money, a wireless transmitter, and a British intelligence service waiting for information isn’t just a hole in the swastika of German oppression; it’s a rent right through it.

But Navarre brings me back to reality. “The British know nothing. And Donitz’s wolf pack rules the seas. Last month his U-boats sunk seven hundred thousand tons of cargo bound for England. The Brits are about to run out of food, fuel, iron, aluminum. Without supplies, they can’t plan an attack on the Nazis.”

I frown. It sounds as if it might be months before they can think of anything more than just staying alive.

“They want us to put agents into the submarine bases,” Navarre goes on. “If we can tell them the U-boats’ movements, then they can blow up those U-boats. If we save their supplies…”

“They can use those supplies to build tanks and airplanes and ships.”

“Exactly.”

“I thought they’d be further ahead with plans to invade Europe.”

“That’s why they need Alliance.” Navarre thumps the table. “For now, we help them understand their enemy and protect their supplies. The rest comes later.”

How much later? The occupation began almost a year ago. Will it go on for another? Until mid-1942, perhaps?

“Schaerrer’s ex-navy,” I say, moving over to my map, because we’ll only be ready to fight in mid-1942 if I act, not worry. “He can start on the U-boats. What else?”

Navarre inserts himself between me and the map, expression inscrutable. “Every agent needs a code name. As Alliance’s leader, I’m N1. I told them my chief of staff is POZ55. It’s time to lose ourselves.”

Will we be able to recover ourselves, once the war has ended?

If it ends.

Stop . I make myself focus on Navarre. “Your chief of staff? Who’s he?”

“Take a look in the mirror. And say hello to POZ55.”

Me? Impossible.

But Navarre just says, “I didn’t tell them you’re a woman.”

I’m once again a lie. Chief of staff for a team of men, led by a man, reporting to men in Britain who don’t know I’m a woman.

But Navarre is already moving on, unconcerned by the magnitude of having lied to MI6. “I told them what Faye’s up to in North Africa.”

Léon Faye . The man with the dark hair and the fire inside him. Will his coup in North Africa set the Nazis ablaze? Or will it set him ablaze instead?

And will the British set me ablaze if they find out I’m a woman?

I tune in to Navarre saying, “The British want to speed things up in Algiers. I’ll focus on North Africa and leave the French sectors to you. They want answers to these questions.”

He passes me pages and pages asking: Where are the anti-aircraft defenses located? What ships depart from each port? What do they carry? How many U-boats are in the Gironde estuary?

Rather than being terrified at the amount of information they want, I’m thrilled with its specificity. Now I know exactly where to recruit the go-betweens who will link the British to the answers they need.

Providentially, Couscous arrives shortly after with a prize—a man who’s so tall it’s hard to take him in at one glance. Even so, his clothes are too big for him, as if his mother made them for a giant who turned out to be refreshingly human instead.

“This is Vallet. He knows all about radios,” Coustenoble says.

I point to the transmitter. “Then that’s yours,” I tell Vallet. “You’ll need to find a room where you can discreetly hang the aerial. Your code name is CIR36.”

He beams as if a code name is a Légion d’honneur, and I blink at the way he’s so proud of his illegal radio, trying not to show more emotion than a woman in charge of men should. But how much is too much? Would the people working for me prefer someone indifferent, or someone who’s moved by each poignant second that marks her days?

I turn to Schaerrer, remind myself that I have to start being like Navarre. “You’ll head up the Occupied Zone,” I tell him.

To Couscous I say, “You’re my adjutant.”

Pride rather than fear is evident on their faces, too. It makes my next words falter, spoken in the voice of Marie-Madeleine rather than POZ55. “We have to go to Paris.”

Occupied Paris. Where the Nazis rule.

Coustenoble frowns. “What’s our intrepid leader doing?” He points to the questionnaires and pages of coding instructions Navarre dumped into my arms. “You have all the work and all the danger, too.”

“Navarre’s focusing on North Africa, which is hardly risk-free,” I say curtly.

It’s redundant for me to ask questions like: Would I be holding all the paperwork if I were a man? When millions of lives are at stake, you back your leader. You get people to do the things they’re best at. Navarre’s a visionary. And I’m chief of staff of a British-sponsored Resistance network, a job I know almost nothing about. But nor does anyone else. So I’ll just have to get on with it and try not to get any of us killed.

God help us.

—

The first time we’re due to receive a radio transmission from London, Coustenoble, Schaerrer, Navarre, and I cluster around the box of dials and crystals watching Vallet, our gentle giant. His face lights up, he gets to work with his pencil, and I transpose his scribble into columns so I can decode it using the sign and key number of my own personal code book, Dumas’s LaDame aux Camélias .

Yesterday we sent our first transmission to London detailing the movements of a U-boat out of its base, intelligence Schaerrer gathered from an informant. What emerges from tonight’s decryption is the news that the British have sunk that U-boat with all hands aboard. And a convoy of container ships it was stalking got away with enough supplies to see Britain through another month.

Thanks for your friendship stop we shall avenge them together end, the message concludes.

Vallet picks me up and swings me around. Couscous takes my hand and we spin too, before Schaerrer twirls me halfway across the room.

Navarre raises his fist into the air. “To Alliance.”

—

I’m used to Aprils in Paris when the dawn plays a joyful pizzicato over the sky, plucking away the night, when the boulevards fill with Parisiennes swinging baskets of bread from their arms. But that was back when Paris’s heart was red, white, and blue.

Now, near the Louvre, soldiers are gathered around a tank whose guns point along the Rue de Rivoli at housewives queuing for food. One soldier takes out a dagger and cuts off a tranche of butter, smearing it onto a baguette. The French boys nearby whisper their admiration. They want to be that Nazi with his dagger and muscular tank.

I’ve spent so much time surrounded by people who think the same as I do that I’ve forgotten our enemy isn’t just the Nazis. It’s ignorance and passivity, things as hard to battle as a flesh-and-blood foe.

As if to underscore the thought, around the next corner is a poster: The German military tribunal pronounced a death sentence for Professor Bénédict James of Paris for enacting violence against a soldier in the German army. He was shot this morning .

The name on the poster blurs and I picture Navarre’s name, my name, Coustenoble’s name.

God . We’re fighting against tanks and bullets with little paper notes.

But as I stand there, I see that a V has been cut through the grime on a neighboring window. V for victory. My eyes attuned, I see more of them. Scratched onto a wall. Carved into the sidewalk beneath my feet.

Somebody knelt down in the dead of night and scraped that mark into the cobblestones so others would know that Paris still has a heart.

So I ignore the poster and walk to my old apartment to see if it can be used as a base. But the concierge shakes her head.

“The Germans were here,” she says. “They’re looking for you, Madame. They ordered me to tell them when you returned.”

I thought the Vichy police were only onto Navarre. But if the Nazis were here…

Thank God the false papers I’m carrying, made for me by a crony of Navarre’s, say I’m Jeanne Chatel. Nobody knows that Marie-Madeleine is in Paris.

“The SD have set up in one of the finest townhouses on Avenue Foch,” the concierge continues. “They take people there…” She falters. “They never come back out.”

The Sicherheitsdienst, charged with gathering intelligence about Nazi enemies like me. My hand tightens on the doorknob.

“I need five minutes,” I say.

“Hurry,” she says before slipping out, leaving me alone with my possessions.

My piano, constant friend from childhood, treasure house of sounds that can squeeze your heart until you’re breathless from the sheer, fugitive beauty of it all. I can’t make myself touch it. Because—when will I ever play it again?

Over there, wrappers from the candies my amah used to buy me and Yvonne in Shanghai. Christian’s rattle. Béatrice’s red shoes that she loved so much the soles are almost worn away. One glance is enough to put me right back there when she unwrapped them at our first Christmas in Paris, when my children no longer had a father and I thought my mistake of a marriage might ruin them forever. She’d laughed so delightedly that I realized they weren’t ruined at all.

I touch the shoes, tiny pieces of the person who used to be Marie-Madeleine Méric. Wife. Mother. Rally driver. Pilot. Journalist. Radio host. The woman I tried so hard to shape after I left Morocco. I don’t want to let her go. But…

It’s time to lose ourselves, Navarre had said. That’s when I feel the wrench, as if Marie-Madeleine just stepped out of my skin, leaving behind POZ55, whom I don’t know at all.

But she’s all I have.

I make myself leave, refuse to look back. Those things are ephemera and their time is done. I can never let myself think of those little red shoes, because then I would drown in the flood of my tears.

—

When I arrive on Maurice and Marguerite’s doorstep, they take one look at my face and pour me a drink.

“The reality of Paris is more shocking than reading about it in notes?” Marguerite asks sympathetically.

They’ve been sending me information since the beginning, so I should be prepared. But right now I feel like my expertise is chief of nothing.

“I need a bigger hat,” I say, pulling off my chic little Schiaparelli madcap.

I choose one of Marguerite’s enormous cartwheel hats, which completely obscures my face, and prepare to go back out there. Before I can, Marguerite passes me a note from my sister.

Ma chère soeur . Bless you .

That’s all it says. But I know what it means. Yvonne’s husband is no Nazi, but he has many friends in the Vichy government. I can’t go near their apartment and put them at risk. But they want me to do what their profile and connections mean they cannot.

God, I want to hug her. All I can do is write her an equally innocuous note in return: I love you both .

On the doorstep, Maurice says, “Tell us if we can do more.”

He’s the ideal person to lead the Paris sector. But he’s also a duke and the father of three children. I don’t want more families caught up in this battle. So I just kiss his cheeks and stride off, keeping the hat brim low.

For how many months will I walk like this, unable to tip my head up to the sky?

—

I visit my friends and acquaintances. Some meetings are sweet, others bitter as people talk gaily about Nazis they met at a dinner party. But I’m able to establish enough letterboxes at bars and brasseries where agents can leave information to be collected by couriers who’ll bring everything to me at Pau.

One night, as I’m walking back to my rented room, I hear footsteps behind me. I don’t know whether to slow down or walk faster. The British have given me a gun, but I only know how to shoot and hope. The Nazis know how to shoot and kill.

When I reach my room, I collapse onto the bed, breathing as fast as if Hitler himself were stalking me.

Schaerrer finds me there some time later. His face is too serious for such a young man.

“A courier came,” he says. “You need to go back to Pau right now.”

“What happened?” My breath, only just under control, gallops once more.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”