Page 18 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

17

Lingering

Toulouse, February–May 1942

Léon summons his air force colleagues and I’m impressed at how many arrive for a meeting after just one message from their former commanding officer. We meet the first, Colonel Kauffmann, in the lounge of the H?tel de Paris in Toulouse. He’s impossible to miss, wearing a pair of army trousers so old they belong in a museum, and a gray cape—a man who must always fly, even when not in a plane.

“I know he looks a bit like an actor left over from the silent film era,” Léon murmurs as we approach.

“I think he looks like a seasoned swashbuckler ready for his next exploit.”

Léon laughs. “That’s exactly who Kauffmann is.”

The colonel slaps Léon on the back with affection before all but shouting, “You need help on the ground this time, Commandant?”

I shoot a look at Léon. Is Kauffmann trying to give us all up?

“I’ll book a room upstairs,” Léon says, and once his back is to Kauffmann, he whispers to me, “Slight deafness is an occupational hazard for a pilot.” He hesitates only a second before adding, “He’s not the only one.”

Of course. Sitting in a cockpit every day with the roar of an engine hammering your ears is damaging. I like that Léon has handled the situation so he doesn’t embarrass his friend, and I like that he’s revealed his own vulnerability to me, rather than trying to hide it.

Léon Faye grows more charming by the second.

Upstairs in a room that looks as unloved as everything else in France that hasn’t genuflected to Nazis, Kauffmann bellows, “Child’s play,” when I ask him to lead an Alliance sector in the Dordogne.

“My farm in Sarlat can be our base,” Kauffmann goes on. “I know someone who can be our radio operator and another who’d make a good courier.”

I smile. The colonel is an even better recruit than Léon promised. Even my soul relaxes. Was this how I made Navarre feel? As if he needn’t only rely on me to do things, but to anticipate them as well?

Except…

The final hurdle.

“I’m in charge of the network,” I tell Kauffmann.

“Fine,” Kauffmann says in a manner so unfazed I’m not even sure he’s realized I’m a woman, and I’m happy that my appearance has, for once, been so completely disregarded.

The colonel nods toward Léon and says, “I’ve had enough of reporting to him. Back in Algiers, we renamed the military citations ‘the Fayes’ because we’d all have to sit there waiting for the endless recitation of his brilliance at dangerous low-flying missions to end so we could finally get a drink.”

Léon’s cheeks are pink as he says to me, “You can order him to stop.”

But I grin and shake my head and Kauffmann leans conspiratorially forward.

“Commandant Faye was the wood we’d knock upon before a mission, the four-leaf clover we’d want beside us. He survived crash landings and enemy fire, even being captured by the enemy. There was a boy named Louis Faye who decided he wanted to be as decorated as the man who shared almost the same name as him. So he asked to take Léon’s place in a mission. The kid went out, but he never came back. Mechanical failure in the plane our friend Faye had been meant to fly. He’s ruled by the goddess of fortune.”

Halfway through this recital, Léon moves over to the sideboard, pouring out three brandies, keeping his back carefully turned toward us until Kauffmann finishes. When he returns with the drinks, the gray in his eyes has clouded over the green, as if he still mourns the boy who’d wanted to be like him and who had died instead.

—

The sidewalk is crowded on our way back to the station, and Léon and I are constantly moved together and apart by passersby. Léon always maneuvers himself back to my right side—the side with the limp. I’m surprised he’s even noticed it; most people don’t. I also hate that he’s seen my hidden weakness on top of the obvious one everyone points out: that I’m a woman.

The next time the traffic separates us, I maneuver myself to his other side, only to have him steer himself instantly back to my right.

I stop. He must see on my face that I’m aware of what he’s doing, because he looks at the ground like a guilty child. “I wasn’t trying to patronize you,” he says quickly. “I know you don’t need my help. I was just trying to make sure you knew help was there, if you ever did.”

The truth is, I do sometimes need help. French roads are cobbled and uneven and occasionally I stumble. It’s why I usually walk beside walls.

“Léon,” I say, and he looks back at me, expression wary. But I’m not angry. The man beside me isn’t Edouard. He’ll never scold me if I lose my balance. “Thank you.”

“Marie-Madeleine…” He hesitates, and there’s something about the way he’s looking at me that makes me feel like we’re standing against a backdrop of Tchaikovsky, silk, and champagne, rather than a street stained with swastikas. “I’m trying to only give you as much as you’ll take,” he says softly, and his words are the music, the silk, and the heady cocktail, too.

For the very first time, I acknowledge both what is and isn’t happening between us. “I wish I could accept more. And I wish…”

Not that I hadn’t married Edouard, because then I wouldn’t have Béatrice and Christian. Not that it wasn’t wartime, because then I’d never have met Léon. “I wish I’d met you fifteen years ago,” I say at last.

The touch of his finger against my hair is so fast, so light—almost as if he’s making sure I’m really there, saying these words to him.

“I thought maybe you were just being kind to a man with a crush, like you are with Lucien. Knowing you feel something, too…” He stops.

A beat that neither of us knows what to do with, then he grins and says, “I was a jerk fifteen years ago. Better that you didn’t know me then.”

His smile is a coup de foudre and I have to make myself turn away from the storm.

—

Léon and I travel for two months, always in each other’s company. It’s exhilarating to see the second wave of Alliance taking shape in sectors led by Léon’s excellent air force contacts. He might be a better chief of staff than I was, which I admit to him after a successful meeting with a gypsy pilot named Mahout who’s promised to help us pull off the aerial magic trick of landing London’s new midnight plane service.

Léon laughs. “Only when I’ve managed to fold myself into a mailbag will I be a better chief of staff than you were.”

I make a show of tipping my head right back to take in his six-foot-plus frame and say cheerfully, “Well, it looks like I really am the best, then,” and we board the train with smiles on our faces, smiles that widen when we find a blissfully empty carriage.

I toss my red beret onto the rack—the Vichy regime thinks they’re a sign of one’s la francité, so I wear one everywhere—and run a hand through my hair, taking the opportunity of having no eavesdroppers to summarize what we’ve accomplished so far.

I conclude by saying, “Paris still doesn’t have a proper leader. And I need someone to head up Brittany—Lorient is the largest submarine base, and those U-boats are eating up Allied ships like they’re croissants. I need someone to take over from Schaerrer.” My good mood fades. “Hopefully I won’t be gifting the Nazis another agent to murder.”

“Your agents are offering themselves,” Léon says. “By keeping them inside a network, they’re safer than if they were out there committing random acts of sabotage.”

It’s an optimistic assessment. Which is why he’s my chief of staff—to remind me that for every peril of leadership, there are blessings. It is safer to be part of a network than to fight on your own. So I decide to be sanguine for the rest of the journey to Pau.

“It’ll be good to see Coustenoble again.” I smile at the thought of what color his hair might be now.

“You trust him?” Léon asks.

There’s fire in my voice when I reply, “He knelt on a ruler for eight hours while they burned his skin with cigarettes, and he told them nothing.”

Léon grimaces. “I need to make sure that Alliance’s agents are loyal. Especially the ones closest to you.”

I hear fear in his voice. Someone is scared for me. Not just for me as la patronne . But for me as Marie-Madeleine.

“If the Nazis find out what you’re really doing—” He cuts himself off.

I can no longer hold his gaze, the same way I can’t hold the hand that rests on his knee—one palm large enough to wrap around both of mine—even as I remember what it’s like to let your fingers slide into someone else’s, the frisson of claiming each other.

Just the idea of it makes my stomach clench.

“Years ago, before I had children,” I say, voice low, “I loved to drive too fast. I’d pause for just a moment at the top of a steep stretch of wildly curving road, then I’d fling myself at it, wanting the feeling of being only a second away from exhilaration or injury. Now…” I shake my head, marveling at how much love can change you—at how much you want to change because there’s nothing more important than the two warm bodies you’ve been given the honor of mothering.

“Now, when I pause at the top, I think of Béatrice and Christian. Then I take the road, still going fast, but not too fast. For just one moment, I regret being seconds away from the exhilaration, knowing I can never have it again. Then it passes. With every step I take for Alliance, I pause and think of a gun pressed to Coustenoble’s temple. To Rivière’s. To…” I make myself say it: “To yours. I do only as much as I can without bringing those guns close enough to shoot. You don’t have to worry about me.”

I look at Léon at last. I shouldn’t have. In his eyes I can see the most fearsome combination of all—danger, as well as devotion to an ideal. Ideals like honor do not have warm skin and powdery scents and tiny beating hearts. Ideals won’t stop you from taking the road too fast—they make you take it without any brakes at all, until the curve in the road is right there and the car is flying into the air and nobody can say it was wrong, but those watching weep just the same.

Léon’s a soldier. He’ll break my heart if I move even an inch closer. He will never brake, not while there are Frenchmen in prisons and Nazis on streets, not while there’s still a line drawn like a scar across the country he’s sworn to give his life for. He won’t brake even if I’m standing at the top of the hill begging him to stop.

Worst of all, this thing that will break my heart is also why I feel the wobble of standing on the edge of falling in love with him. I thought I’d been a fool the first time I fell in love, but it turns out I’m still just as heedless. To know the person you could love will break your heart and to consider loving them anyway is the most reckless thing of all.

I don’t know how much of that Léon sees on my face, but the hand on his knee clenches as if he has to stop it from reaching out. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“That’s like apologizing because the sun is too hot to touch,” I say softly.

As brilliant as the sun is, so too is Léon, and I wouldn’t want him any other way.

—

When Coustenoble opens the door to us in Pau, he snaps, “You shouldn’t have come. We’ve spent weeks protecting you and now you walk right into the lion’s den.”

It’s like being told by my children that they don’t want me. I flinch, and Léon’s hand touches the small of my back as if he’s trying to absorb my shock.

“Are you all right?” I ask Couscous, then flagellate myself. What a stupid question. Who would be all right after torture?

“I’m sorry—”

Couscous cuts me off. “Everyone’s inside.”

I feel like even more of a fraud when I shake the hand of every agent who was imprisoned—embracing Josette—only to have them thank me in return.

Then Lucien hurtles in, exclaiming, “Look what I did!” He waves an arm around at the villa he’s set up with everything a sector headquarters needs.

“This is for doing even better than finding a way to cross into Germany.” I kiss his cheek.

Lucien gapes at me. The men hoot at his dumbfoundedness and I can’t help but smile. When everyone’s settled down, I tell them that Léon is Alliance’s new chief of staff, an announcement that’s met with a thrilled chorus. Léon’s reputation as the architect of the Algiers coup has given him a kind of warrior status, and they listen eagerly as he allocates them jobs.

Amid the noise, I want to look across at Coustenoble and search through his brown eyes to see what’s troubling him. But I’m afraid I’ll find reproach there for the things he had to do for me. So I focus somewhere around his shoulder and indicate that he should follow me into the adjoining room.

Coustenoble shuts the door and, his back turned toward me, says, “You still have confidence in me? I knew something wasn’t right, but I still got caught.”

At last I understand. When Christian was three, he peed on a new rug and I shouted at him. Afterward, neither of us could meet the other’s eyes, both afraid we’d done something unforgivable. As soon as I realized that all we cared about was each other, I pulled him into the tightest hug and said, “I’ll love you past forever no matter what you do.”

To Couscous, I say, “There’s no one in France I’d rather have as my adjutant.”

He faces me at last, relief flooding his eyes.

“How’s your cough?” I ask. “Take time to rest before you come to Marseille.”

“I’ve been in prison resting for weeks, little one.”

So we talk until Léon comes in with an air of impatience and says, “Let’s go.”

Couscous bristles as if he thinks Léon’s ordering me to leave, but I hear again the fear in Léon’s voice. He doesn’t want me in Pau for long in case it’s raided again.

I tell Léon, “Give me a minute.” When he’s gone, I ask Coustenoble, “Can you go to Fresnes? See what you can find out about Vallet and the others, if it’s possible to arrange an escape. And take this”—I pass him a package of money, soap, and a pair of stockings from Spain—“to Vallet’s grandmother.”

Couscous smiles. “Léon Faye is the kind of man legend gathers around, and we need someone who inspires late-night stories told over campfires. But more than that, we need someone we can revere. People lay down their lives for the things they worship, little one. There’s a difference between inspiring and revering—the first we do to someone we think we can be like. The second we do to someone we know we can never be like, because they are extraordinary. That’s what I hear when the men speak of you at night. Léon will find good men and he’ll furnish them with ideas that make them blaze. But you’ll go to Spain in a mailbag and then ask about my cough; you’ll know the names of the agents’ children. You’ll send their grandmothers your own silk stockings. That’s why it should always be you in charge, and no one else.”

I squeeze Couscous in a quick hug, then escape the villa, chased out by long-ago words from the Bible: I will destroy your idols and your sacred stones.

No! I want to tell any agent who thinks he reveres me. I’m nothing more than a false idol, and when people worship those, pillars crash down, chariots burn, and entire cities are buried forever beneath the dust.

—

Back on the train, I can’t shake the foreboding, and I say to Léon, “We need to move. I’ve been traveling too much. Vichy will notice.” I sigh a little wistfully. “I’ll miss Madeleine Rivière and her shoes making music while I work.”

Léon replies, “I’ll find you something just as good.”

My new navigator. My spirit lifter.

But there’s still a melancholy in me, like a song in D-sharp minor, the key Schubert said ghosts would speak in if they had tongues. My self-doubt is a constant ghost, and I want to wear Léon’s confidence instead, stand in the shoes of his military reputation, walk into a room as a known leader.

“When you were first put in charge of men,” I ask quietly, “did you doubt yourself?”

Léon thinks for a moment, then moves to the seat beside me. “When you enlist in the military, you’re bargaining with your own life. But when you become a lieutenant, a captain, a commandant, you’re bargaining with other people’s lives. If you don’t doubt yourself in those circumstances, then you’re a monster.”

Through the window are cliffs dropping precipitously to a bruise-colored sea, but the ground Léon’s next words move us onto is the most dangerous of all.

“I was more nervous meeting Coustenoble today than I’ve ever been, even in a lightning storm turned upside down in the clouds,” he says. “Because if he didn’t want me, I think you would have turned me away. And…”

I don’t know if he pauses because he doesn’t know how to finish the sentence or because he can feel the lightning storm between us, the one that’s turning me upside down.

For the first time, my body leans ever so slightly into it.

“Why did you decide to fly?” I ask, voice a little huskier than before.

He smiles. “Moroccan skies are so magnificent that I wondered what it would be like to be in that sky. So I learned to fly.”

“Do you miss it?”

He nods. “That and Aleppo soap.”

I laugh. “And coffee.”

“Sitting on a terrace, watching a sunset.” Wistfulness now, rather than humor.

“Playing the piano,” I say.

“Lingering over breakfast with a newspaper.”

“Just…lingering.”

Suddenly my hand reaches out. Too late I remember my red-raw chilblains. Before I can withdraw it, Léon folds his hand around mine as if he doesn’t see the blisters—but as if he’s been waiting his whole life for this moment.

And it’s just how I thought it would be. Too much and still not enough.

We sit like that for the rest of the journey, lingering over the view of cliffs almost as beautiful as those that lifted Rabat up to the sky, of pink flamingos and startlingly white horses galloping across the Camargue plains. And I wonder how much longer I can hold on to my vow to not fall in love with Léon Faye.

—

I don’t return to HQ with Léon. I need my family; need my mother to tell me I’m not a terrible person for holding a man’s hand. I need to not have Léon ask, What does this mean?

I don’t know.

I know only that as I walk down the path of the house at Mougins, my whole body is alert for the sound of my children. Then Christian flies out of the house and into my arms , hurtling me straight back into the past, when I was a mother.

Now my daughter is making her careful way along the path, wincing from the ache in her hip, determined not to wait on the steps for me. She’ll reach me no matter how much it hurts.

I take Christian’s hand and we walk toward her, not detracting from her effort, but showing her that we’ll do what we can to reward her striving. Her last few steps are faster and they cost her. She’s within an arm’s reach when she falters, and her face twists as her hip pops. I lift her up, letting her wrap herself around me even though she’s too big to be carried. But after so many months of absence, who doesn’t want to be enveloped by their child?

“Your hip is worse?” I whisper, and she nods.

I carry her inside, embrace my mother, and sit down with Béatrice on my lap. My mother makes us a hearty soup of vegetables she must have been saving in the cellar, and even a little meat. We eat like it’s ice cream, and I listen to my children’s stories of the wily hen who hides her eggs each day in a new place, and the friends they’ve made at school. The breeze ushers in the scent of lemon, thyme, and honeysuckle summers. Above us, the moon is waxing and hangs incomplete and golden, and my feet press into the ground like roots, anchoring me.

Later, I kneel by the bath and help Béatrice wash her hair. When I braid it, I almost weep because my fingers remember exactly how to do it. Then I tuck my children into bed and curl up in a chair in the corner of their room. They keep opening their eyes, peeking out as if they think I’m just a dream. Their father relinquished them years ago, and I read in those anxious glances a fear that I might abandon them, too.

But no. My daughter needs a doctor. Tomorrow, I’m going to telephone everyone I know until I find someone. And I’ll somehow be by her side every step of the way.

My mother slips into the room and puts her arm around me, studying me the way I’ve just gorged on my children. Finally she whispers, as if the secrets in my heart can be read in my eyes, “If Edouard has seen the things you’ve seen these past two years, he’ll no longer want to hold you to a piece of paper for the sake of pride. Be free, ma chérie . Don’t be afraid to love.”

But I’m not just afraid to love—I’m terrified. I’m fighting to rid France of Nazis, fighting to keep my children’s love for me alive, too. Loving Léon will mean fighting a third war. In every decision I make, I’ll want to consider whether I can protect him as well.

Except the leader of a Resistance network must protect her agents above all else.

Where does that leave my children? Where does that leave a man I could love?

—

Late the following afternoon, I walk into HQ and halt when I find everyone in the operations room standing frozen, like a domino chain about to fall.

Then it does fall.

Baston is there, rather than in Vichy, wearing the gravest expression I’ve ever seen. “My dear,” he begins, then Lucien inexplicably bursts through the door, panting, and says, “They have your papers!”

Baston sighs heavily. “Commandant Rollin has ordered you be brought to Vichy to explain yourself.”

My stomach drops like I’ve just fallen off the cliff outside.