Page 17 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

16

Tonight Will Not Be the Last Time I Weep

Marseille, February 1942

Léon and I have only just stepped into the warehouse when Lucien scrambles in, face alight. He’s been watching the prison where Coustenoble, his mother, and the Pau team have been jailed.

“They’re out!” he shouts, and we grin ridiculously at one another for a minute. I want to rush straight to Pau and embrace my adjutant. But I know I can’t risk being seen with Coustenoble and getting him sent back to prison.

Instead I ask Lucien, “How’s your mother?”

“She told me my clothes were dirty,” he grumbles.

“And Coustenoble?”

“Coughing up his lungs.”

I ask Rivière’s wife, Madeleine, “Do we have anything other than carrots?”

“Just some spinach. Maybe a few apples.”

Late winter on rations is measured by the degrees of emptiness in your stomach. Hungry. Ravenous. Happy to eat shark.

I pull out some of MI6’s money and give it to Lucien. “I don’t care what black-market shop you have to go to. Buy milk. Eggs. Meat. Tell Coustenoble I’m ordering him to eat it. Josette, too. And find a building to rent. You’re in charge of locating and furnishing a new Pau office.”

Lucien races out with a worshipful little bow that makes Rivière chuckle.

That one glorious relief gives me the fortitude to ask Audoly a question I’ve been worrying over for days. “Anything from Schaerrer?”

He shakes his head.

“He’s never gone this long without a transmission,” I say to Rivière, who looks as somber as I feel.

He drops his broad hands onto my shoulders. “Perhaps things are just too hot right now.”

Schaerrer has been sending us vital information about U-boat personnel numbers, torpedo stocks, and embarkation dates, so perhaps he does just need to lie low. I can’t send anyone to look for him, because if there’s a trap waiting, they’ll be caught. I should ready another man to take over the sector, just in case. But Schaerrer is irreplaceable.

No one is irreplaceable, he once told me.

I shiver, trying not to think of every premonition I’ve had that’s turned out to be more accurate than a sniper. “I’ll wait another week,” I tell Rivière.

Then I turn to Léon, who’s watching everything with a bemused expression, studying the maps and their code names: Bonne Mère for Marseille, Restaurant for Grenoble, Hangar in Bordeaux, Palais in Pau. Rivière turns to Léon, too, not with the usual buccaneer’s glint in his eye, but suspicion.

“It’s Commandant Faye,” I explain.

Rivière gives Léon a sweeping salute and shouts, “Tell us about the Algiers affair! I wish you’d been able to trounce them all.”

“So do I,” Léon says wryly.

“Maybe the storytelling can wait until lunch,” I tell them, not about to let the point I’m trying to make be derailed by one of those long, mythologizing conversations men have about their exploits.

“Is Siegrist here?” I ask Rivière, who nods. I lead Léon to the room where I interview agents, explaining that Siegrist is a former Paris policeman who fled the city after his network leader betrayed everyone. I’ve been checking out his story with MI6 and last night they confirmed it was genuine.

I take a seat across from Siegrist. “You must be worried about your family. They’re still in Paris?”

Siegrist nods. His ears are the size of saucers and his nose would rival a dolphin’s, but the bleakness in his eyes renders his face far from comical. “My daughters are six and nine. They’re with my wife.”

For one second, my own eyes smart at the thought of those children, who are just a little younger than Béatrice and Christian.

Perhaps a man so obviously distracted by his absent wife and children is someone I should hesitate to employ. But it’s his very depth of feeling for his family that makes me say, “I need someone to manage Alliance’s security team. As a policeman, you’re perfect for the job. It’ll involve teaching every sector how to use lookouts and keep their premises secure, as well as forging identity papers and ration coupons. I’ll send money to your family each month and I’ll pay you a salary, too.”

Siegrist grasps my hand. “Thank you, Madame.”

Another man joins Alliance, but it’s not enough. I need men trained in the military if I’m to do what the British want. Which is what I’m hoping Léon Faye can help me with, once I’ve proven to him that the network doesn’t just exist—it’s flourishing.

He watches as my secretary summons me over, frowning at the new invisible ink Crane gave me. If it’s too close to a fire, it turns brown. I have Audoly send a message to MI6. A courier arrives with messages about a cargo of arms being sent to the Nazis’ Afrika Korps disguised as tins of food. I code the information and Audoly radios it to MI6 so the ship can be blown out of the water. In between, Madeleine brings me cups of café national, the ground-almond murk that now passes for coffee. She’s wearing the shoes I bought in Madrid; I have the ones MI6 sent me for my birthday and I don’t need two pairs. As she cooks for all of us, she sings and taps her heels against the floor, and I love the sound—the steady pulse of Alliance.

Finally, Léon’s impatience reaches a crescendo. “Let’s eat,” he says, standing up. “We’ll try one of the black-market bars on the Canebière.”

For a second, I imagine sitting in a bar and drinking wine and eating food with him as if we were just another ordinary couple getting to know each other. I shake my head. “After escaping Pau, I’m lying low. I live in one of the cave dwellings below the Corniche, and I go only from there to here wearing very large hats.”

“What about my room at the H?tel Terminus? I have some clandestine materials there, too, as it turns out.” He smiles. “Will a Monbazillac do?”

“In the absence of champagne”—I return the smile—“I’ll drink Monbazillac.”

Before the war, a woman would only go with a man to a hotel room for one thing. Now, I go to so many strange places with so many men that I don’t even think of his suggestion as improper, just practical. I need someone like Léon, who’s led squadrons and no doubt has a legion of pilots loyal to him who could help expand the network. And I don’t want to talk to him in front of the already curious Gabriel Rivière.

As we’re leaving, another courier arrives with a message that I wish had come yesterday when I wasn’t trying to show off the network in its best light. I pass it to Rivière, who shouts, “The little bastard! Chasing after money at a time like this?”

“I’m more worried about him giving us up,” I say. “If he’s caught and has to give up something to free himself, he won’t give up his new network.”

“What is it?” Léon asks, and I reluctantly explain that Frédéric, our Nice radio operator, has defected to another network that will pay him more. I don’t want Léon to think it means I can’t command the agents’ loyalty.

“He is a little bastard,” Léon concurs. “What kind of network poaches agents?”

“Trained wireless operators are as rare as good Germans,” I explain. “Now that De Gaulle’s Free French are starting networks, we’re competing for staff. It’s the first time it’s happened to us, though,” I add, hoping that disclaimer is more persuasive than it sounds.

When we reach his room at the H?tel Terminus, Léon pulls out foie gras, bread, and wine and puts them on the table. “Spoils from a friend with a farm near Sarlat,” he says, taking the seat opposite and sipping the wine while I fall on the paté with gusto.

He lets me eat my fill before saying, “I made a stupid offer to escort you to North Africa and then you set out to prove that you were doing just fine without me.” He smiles wryly. “Tell me everything.”

I do. I explain that Alliance has been charged with blunting the Nazis so the Allies can make plans for an invasion of France. Léon listens, interrupting only occasionally to ask a perceptive question, and never, despite his experience in war and men, criticizing any of my choices. I wonder if the experience in prison has tamped down some of the fire I saw in him in Vichy so it still burns, but more enduringly.

And more endearingly.

Stop it, I tell myself. I don’t know why this man has such an effect on me, just that he does—and also that I can’t let myself feel it.

“What do you need most of all?” he asks, refilling my glass with the last of the wine, which tastes like honey and fig and makes the foie gras sing on my palate.

“Two things.” I lean back and relax for the first time that day. “We transmit the urgent messages to London twice a day. Everything else goes via the Vichy diplomatic bag to Spain. It takes too long, and Vichy will soon find out the bag is a party to treason. So MI6 wants to land planes here in France by moonlight. I need someone to—”

“Recruit people who know enough about planes to land one in secret in the dead of night,” he finishes, standing up, pacing, clearly electrified by the prospect. “What’s the second thing?”

“To start up sectors of Alliance right across France. But we need trained leaders to run those sectors, not just eager volunteers.” I sigh. “Navarre always said we needed military men, which I suppose I had mixed feelings about. But he’s right.”

“I can name at least three colonels who are almost sick with the armistice roles they’ve been forced into,” Léon says. “And I know dozens of younger pilots to fill the ranks.”

I grin. “Now I’m imagining Alliance as an enormous airfield populated by dashing airmen—and me, back in my plane, flying alongside them.”

“You fly?” His face lights up with something different now. Admiration, I think, and the chemical composition of the room changes. Heat and fire.

Léon stops in front of me. “If you’ll have me, I’m at your disposal.”

I don’t know how many meanings are trapped in that sentence, just that there are more than one.

I escape past him to the window embrasure. In my head are the words I thought once before, in Spain: someone who might hold me in a gentle embrace; someone who might take the weight from my hip.

But I’m not in Spain. I’m in a hotel room in France with a man who turns all the air around me to turbulence.

“I met your husband in North Africa,” Léon says from behind me.

My whole body stiffens. Who was she, that woman who’d wanted a grand adventure in Morocco with a debonair young captain she’d also fallen for on first sight, the woman who’d instead found a life without bars that had imprisoned her all the same?

What if Léon is hiding locks and bolts beneath his charm, too?

“He never mentioned you,” Léon continues, voice contemplative. “I wondered why, but now, standing here, I think…” He tries again. “You once called me impassioned, but you speak not just with words, but with your eyes and hands and face. With your whole body. Whereas Edouard Méric…” Léon shrugs and says only, “was very different.”

When I don’t speak or turn to face him, he goes on. “I heard other men speak of you too; that they regretted having been able to tempt you into conversation, nothing more. All I could think was—I’d never regret any conversation I was lucky enough to have with you. And that if I was married to you, I don’t think I would ever stop speaking about you.”

For one second I imagine being so cherished with words. And I have to hold on to the windowsill, because I absolutely cannot let myself turn and look at Léon right now.

“What do you want, Marie-Madeleine?” Léon asks softly, still on the other side of the room.

So many things.

But my reply, when it comes, is almost angry, because that’s something I’m allowed to feel, as opposed to every single forbidden feeling I have for Léon Faye. “Will your air force colonels be happy to live on the run, working for an organization that changes shape every day? Will they be happy to report to a woman?”

My hands clench harder on the sill, my wedding ring a scar on one finger, the chilblains around my nails red and ugly—hands so hideous they no longer look like a woman’s. I curl my fingers into my palms to hide them. “I never want to have to ask that question again.”

I hear Léon walk toward me. Side by side we stare at the dusk stealing blue from the sky, at the absence of lights in this city that was once a golden, blazing thing, lit up to welcome anyone who might cross to its shores. “I’m prepared to take orders from you,” he says.

I know, I don’t say. I’ve known that since we first met.

But what he says next shocks me. “Navarre isn’t coming back. Alliance is your network, Marie-Madeleine. That’s what I saw today. It’s not Navarre’s. Not anymore.”

Alliance is mine.

Mine.

I let go of the windowsill. My body turns ever so slightly toward Léon, and I wonder how it’s possible that I lived with my husband for five years and he didn’t know me at all, whereas the man beside me is a virtual stranger and he not only knows me, but he’s prepared to show me the things inside me that I can’t see. All this time, I’ve been leading Navarre’s network but adding the word until .

Until Navarre takes over again.

I’ve been a commander in words but a subordinate in my heart.

Outside, Marseille is consumed by night. And in the darkness, I whisper, “If I stop believing that Navarre is coming back, then I’m truly saying farewell to my children. The person the Nazis will come after is the network leader. What kind of mother…”

I can’t finish the sentence. There are tears in my eyes, and if I speak, they’ll be in my words, breaking apart the syllables and scattering them onto the floor.

“The kind of mother who taught them to never sit back and accept something that they know is wrong,” he says very gently, and now I feel like my heart will break and scatter onto the floor instead. He remembered what I said to him in Vichy more than a year ago.

If I reach up to wipe my cheeks, Léon will forget everything I showed him at the warehouse—that Alliance was alive and hungry for men like him, that I had everything in hand.

But he reaches into his pocket and lays a handkerchief on the sill between us—a white square to wipe away my grief.

He lets me weep, but not alone.

When I can speak, I tell him, “I don’t have a chief of staff. I haven’t replaced anyone. Replacing Vallet is like saying I don’t think he’ll come back. Recruiting a chief of staff is like saying everyone must stop thinking Navarre will return.”

“It’s saying you’re la patronne . That’s what I saw today.”

La patronne. Another name to bear.

Back in 1941 in my apartment in Paris, I thought Marie-Madeleine had stepped out through my skin. Now it’s time for her to step out of my soul.

My first act as a true leader is to say, “When I was Navarre’s chief of staff I never spoke to him about his frailties. I need a chief of staff who tells me mine, like you just did.”

Léon rests his hips against the windowsill so his head is a little lower and it’s easier for us to see each other. “Loving your children isn’t a frailty. It makes you the kind of person the men I saw today follow, because you understand they have families, too. Alliance is a family and that’s its strength. And your not realizing you hadn’t let go of Navarre—that just means your loyalty is larger than your ego, and I’d say that’s a strength, too. One that I, and many others, could probably learn from.”

He doesn’t move closer, hasn’t touched me, not once, but he’s told me in every word tonight that he wants to—and that he wanted to understand why I carried my husband’s name, and that extramarital affairs didn’t suit his honor. Nor do they suit mine. But if marriage is a union, I am not married. The only thing left of my marriage is a piece of paper, easily burned.

So it isn’t marriage that prevents me from taking Léon’s hand. It isn’t that I don’t want to. God, I do. I want to slip my fingers into his, feel the warmth of his palm against mine. I want to slide my hand over his jaw, see how much darker I could make his eyes become.

Do I remember how to kiss?

Yes, I remember. And I’m sure Léon has always known.

“What do you want, Marie-Madeleine?” he asks again, very softly.

My children in my arms. A free France. The safety of my agents.

Three incompatible things. In choosing the first, I’d be turning my back on the rest. By choosing to fight for the second, I’m endangering everyone I love.

I can’t let myself long for any more incompatible things.

Besides, a leader doesn’t have time for wants.

“I want to go back to HQ.”

I don’t know if it’s hurt or understanding that flickers in Léon’s eyes, but he nods and follows me out.

—

Rivière is waiting at HQ with an expression so uncharacteristic it’s frightening. No ebullience, but that same depth of feeling poured into sadness.

“Be brave,” he says, grasping my hand between both of his. “A message came in. Schaerrer was caught a week ago at Bordeaux. They…” He clears his throat, makes himself say it. “They shot him, chief.”

I cross to another window and turn my back on different men, while inside, my bones weep. I know Schaerrer is dead. I’ve known, somehow, for days. Something else my cowardly heart hasn’t wanted to face.

Schaerrer, who gave me Rivière. Schaerrer, who could look straight into the sun. Schaerrer, who told me that the harder it is to see something, the more beautiful it was.

Schaerrer, who christened my first three lieutenants “the tricolor.”

Only the flagpole stands. But it is cracked and broken now.

I never knew it would be so terrible—to be the cause of someone’s death.

I don’t know how it happens, but Schaerrer is suddenly beside me—not his body, but his courage, his ghost breath slipping through me, whispering, I’m with you . Carry on . And my mouth is turning up at the corners, the way it always did when Schaerrer was there, tipping Armagnac down my throat, joking about Santa Claus.

What if, in war, the dead are not dead? What if they’re allowed to walk among us when we need to believe that the world isn’t really as wretched as it seems?

As abruptly as it arrived, Schaerrer’s presence is gone and I’m left blinking away tears.

Rivière passes me a tiny piece of paper that was hidden in the corner of an envelope sent from the prison to Schaerrer’s uncle. But I know it’s meant for me.

I am glad I have preserved my honor, it says.

It means he hasn’t betrayed us. That he gave up his life to give us ours.

I could weep as if one of my own children were dead. But I am la patronne now, the one who is never allowed to cry.

So I dam up my tears. I steady my voice. I say to everyone gathered there, “From today, we will work harder than ever, for Schaerrer, who cannot. We will uncover the location of every gun emplacement in France, every munitions factory, every airfield. We’ll thwart the movements of every plane, ship, and U-boat; we’ll wear down the Nazi military machine until it’s so weak that an Allied invasion planned around all the information we’re about to gather will be so successful, I’ll never hear the word Nazi again.”

I pause for breath from the words that have come out as a battle cry and a prayer. “I’m reorganizing Alliance. As leader, my job is strategy and planning. Faye is my new chief of staff. For all day-to-day matters, see him.”

And so the title— la patronne —settles over my head like a double-edged sword waiting to fall. For I am both la patronne and a murderer. Schaerrer will not be the last man I send out to die.

And tonight will not be the last time I weep.