Page 20 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

19

If Only I’d Never…

Toulouse, June–August 1942

Béatrice wakes in tears. The plaster is brutal, wrapped from the tips of her toes to her armpits, preventing movement and fixing her legs in an awkward, akimbo position. All she can do is lie still, which, for a ten-year-old, is untenable.

I’m trying to console her when Coustenoble strolls in, pulls a stuffed tiger—his new namesake—from behind his back, and growls. Béatrice giggles, tears arrested.

“Where did you get that?” I ask. A stuffed tiger in rationed France?

He looks mock offended. “When have I not been able to get what you need?”

I kiss his cheeks and try not to wince at how thin he still is from prison. “My mother made a tincture for your cough. She’ll yell at me if you don’t take it, so to save me from an earful…”

He takes it with a laugh. “Don’t tell me she’s more stubborn than you?”

“Where do you think I get it from?”

When Béatrice falls asleep, exhausted, we turn to business.

“So we’re going to turn into a menagerie,” Couscous says. “No matter how much you bristle, Hedgehog, you’ll always be little one to me.”

I laugh. “Can you report to Commandant Faye—”

“Eagle,” Couscous admonishes, and I can tell that soon we’ll truly be a zoo.

Once my instructions are done, Couscous tells me, “Frédéric’s still with his new network. He’s not in prison trading his life for yours. And I went to Fresnes. It’s a fortress. Inescapable. But I found a way to get information out from inside. The prisoners get a sheet of paper once a month to send letters to family. They tear off small squares and hide them in the laundry their relatives are allowed to wash. Vallet’s girlfriend has been saving the papers.”

“Vallet’s girlfriend?” I close my eyes. Will I ever be a true leader? One who can not only think of a way to get Vallet out of a fortress, but who’d also know that he had a girlfriend, and her name as well?

“She’s fearless,” Coustenoble says, looking awestruck. “She climbed a tree across from the prison and shouted through the windows for them to keep their spirits up.”

I want to applaud. But…“She’ll get herself arrested.”

“She told me…” Coustenoble hesitates, but my prickles bristle.

“All right, little one,” he says. “No hiding anything. She told me Vallet’s clothes show the marks of his having been tortured.”

Torture? No . If only I’d never—

Never what? Never let him be our radio operator? Never met Navarre? Never grown up loving France? When did it start exactly, my resistance? Which moment would have been the right one to change?

I know only that I need to read Vallet’s messages. In them, he mentions beatings, brutalities, and traps, and the fact that it’s impossible not to let small things slip to the Germans.

I understand. If someone had, with the threat of more pain, asked me a question the moment I’d been released from the mailbag in Madrid, I’m sure a secret would have forced its way from my lips, too.

“The upshot of his messages is that the Nazis know more than we think,” I tell Coustenoble. “Which means someone is talking. But if it’s not Frédéric, then who?”

“Bla,” Couscous says without a moment’s hesitation.

The English radio operator whose behavior had worried us enough that I’d asked London to double-check his background.

“MI6 said he’d been fully vetted,” I remind him. “He’s been sending them regular transmissions from Normandy. It can’t be him.”

“Then why is he at the prison every week visiting our agents and their families?”

My pen drops to the table. “He’s not supposed to be in Paris at all.”

Suddenly I don’t care about the assurances of the professionals in London. “Find someone who can courier my messages rather than you,” I tell Coustenoble. “I need you in Paris keeping an eye on Bla.”

He salutes and walks to the door, and one of those haunting presentiments lands in my soul, telling me it won’t be long before Vallet walks beside Schaerrer. The blue and the white together again.

“Couscous!” I call. But he’s gone.

For how long can I keep the red safe, too?

—

After breakfast each day, I wheel Béatrice’s bed over to the windows. She looks at the sky and tells me she’s imagining traveling to all the faraway places. My daughter has the fortitude to lift her spirit out of the prison of her cast. I need to do whatever I can to help the rest of us slip through the Nazi-barricaded windows of France.

I interview the people Léon sends me. Families and towns and entire communities join Alliance hiding behind animal names: Mandrill in Bordeaux, Unicorn in Brest, Dragon in Normandy. I send for General Baston, who needs to leave via the new escape line we’ve set up over the Pyrenees for agents facing too much Gestapo heat and for downed pilots the British want evacuated. The minute Vichy discovers I’m not the innocent mother they think I am, they’ll arrest Baston, the man who sat by my side while I lied.

He refuses to leave France. “I want to lead the Brittany sector for you.”

Brittany is where the mammoth Lorient U-boat base is located. I desperately need an experienced agent there. “But that’s more dangerous than Vichy,” I protest.

“With my hair color, I’ll be Sheepdog,” he says firmly.

His eyes, a little watery with age, look out at me from a face lined by all the battles he’s fought in his years of being a general. And he wants to fight on still.

Yet again, the people of Alliance bring me to my knees. Like Coustenoble, who’s more tired than ever from the couriering. But I haven’t found anyone to take on that task—until he arrives one day with a woman in a cotton dress and cork-soled shoes. She’s blond and petite with a ferocious scowl on her face.

“This is Monique, Vallet’s girlfriend,” Couscous says. “She’s made so much trouble at Fresnes that the Gestapo are looking for her.”

“I’m not going into hiding,” she says resolutely.

Another optimistic adventurer. So I tell her, “You can be my courier.”

“My code name will be Ermine,” she announces, and I smile. The little snow-white hunter of the night. It’s perfect.

“We need evidence that it’s Bla,” I tell Coustenoble, who’ll now return to Paris. “And we need it—”

“Yesterday,” he finishes, before he’s gone, another bottle of cough tincture pressed into his hand.

Ermine plays with Béatrice while I read through the messages Coustenoble delivered. The most important one tells me that a British agent is coming in via parachute to train Léon’s air force recruit, Mahout, and we’ll be landing our first Lysander in August, which is next month!

With planes coming in and out, bringing us supplies and taking out intelligence, an invasion will soon come. Maybe even by the end of 1942, just a few months away. If we work harder than ever, we can make that happen before anyone else dies.

Ermine leaves with a kiss for Béatrice and a wave for me.

“She’s my favorite,” Béatrice says.

“I thought I was your favorite.” I tickle her under her armpit, one of the few places not covered by the cast.

“She’s my favorite animal.” She giggles. “You’re a mommy.”

She has no idea that everyone calls me Hérisson now.

“Which animal is your favorite?” she asks.

My favorite is the Eagle, I don’t say. The one who writes at the bottom of each message, in code, I miss you . How’s Béatrice?

My eyes fall on another of MI6’s messages. Want you in London next month.

A leader can’t leave her network. Which means I’ll have to send Léon to London. There’s no one else I trust to represent us to the British as I would. So the next day, I send a note telling him to be ready for the first Lysander flight. And I pray: Please God, let me see him at least once before he leaves.

—

Too soon, the morning arrives when Dr. Charry says, “Now that Béatrice’s cast is off and she’s moving around, there’s no reason why she can’t go home. But I don’t want to throw you out.”

I understand what he’s saying: He’ll keep sheltering me. But then I might bring the Nazis to my daughter’s door, which would be the vilest thing I could ever do.

So when Ermine arrives, I ask her to tell Léon and my mother that I’ll be ready tomorrow. Léon’s found a new HQ, and Ermine has found my mother and Béatrice a cottage near the Pyrenees, far from danger. Christian is safely ensconced in a boarding school in Toulouse. But that afternoon, Coustenoble makes an unscheduled appearance. His face is sheened with sweat. Dr. Charry is with him and he beckons for me to follow, obviously having been drawn into more subterfuge.

Inside an operating room, Léon and Ermine are waiting beside a tray lined with scalpels and catgut sutures.

My hip pops and I only just catch hold of the wall in time.

“Laval’s been reappointed Pétain’s second in command,” Léon says, voice grim. “The Nazis want Vichy to do something about Resistance activity in the free zone, and Laval is their man. He’s going to let the Gestapo take radio detection vans into the free zone to hunt down Resistance networks. And—”

Coustenoble thrusts out a note. “From Vallet. Bla just had the entire Normandy sector arrested. And Bla must have told Vichy that you lied because Laval’s issued a warrant for your arrest.” He whispers the next part. “Vichy said you were another Mata Hari. You’ve been declared a spy and an enemy. And they’ve put a price on your head.”

“Which means it won’t just be the Vichy police and the Gestapo looking for you,” Léon breaks in. “Every thief and pirate in France will be on the hunt, too. And they won’t stop until they find you.”

Mata Hari. She was a mother of two.

They shot her dead.

On our first night here, Béatrice had asked me if I was frightened. I’m terrified, my darling, are words I can’t say to anyone.

“What’s my price?” I ask lightly, hiding the fear—always hiding something.

“It isn’t funny,” Léon retorts.

I take Vallet’s note from Couscous and the deciphering grid from Léon.

Last interrogation made me certain. Bla traitor. Gestapo showed me OCK set delivered to him after my arrest.

I swear, using one of the most colorful phrases I’ve picked up from my agents, then pass the decrypted message to Léon. His curse is worse than mine.

Vallet is saying that the guards have shown him a transmitter I’d sent to Bla as a backup. The only way the Germans could have gotten hold of it was from him.

He’s had our whole Normandy sector thrown in jail. He’s responsible for last year’s Pau and Paris arrests. For Vallet’s imprisonment. And a terrible part of me wishes it had been anyone other than Vallet, who has a grandmother to care for and a girlfriend, Ermine, who’s standing somberly at my side because she knows as well as I do what it means.

If the Gestapo have shown Vallet that they have one of our radio sets, it’s their final play. If he doesn’t talk now, they’ll have no more use for him.

And the white will join the blue in heaven.

It’s lucky that London is impossible to travel to—otherwise I’d be halfway there, storming into the offices of the men who sent Bla to us. The men who’ve caused me to so badly let down the people I asked to trust me.

For the first time I realize what I’m up against. Not just Vichy. Not just Nazis. But the enemy within.

People will make me trust them, and then they’ll betray me.

To fight them I have to tamp down the incandescent grief and the fear, but I can still feel it burning away the perimeter of my heart. What if every grief I smother makes my heart smaller?

“Thank God for Vallet,” I say, voice so compressed I hardly recognize it. “The Germans don’t know he’s getting messages out. So they don’t know that we know about Bla. Take this,” I instruct Léon, scribbling out a message to be transmitted to MI6 informing them that Bla’s a traitor. “We’ll wait for their instructions.”

“Let’s go,” Léon says.

I shake my head, holding up a leader’s hand—or perhaps a mother’s hand—to silence everyone’s protests about arrest warrants and danger. “Send someone to fetch me in two hours. I need to say goodbye to my daughter.”

I walk away from them, close the door, stop in the corridor, press the flat of my hand against my mouth. If Vallet dies, then I’m once again a murderer .

But I’m still not stopping, not leaving to go to the Pyrenees with my daughter.

Which means I’ll keep on murdering.

Marguerite’s last note told me the Germans had rounded up more than ten thousand Jews in the middle of the night. Ten thousand people vanished in the span of one moonrise. More people will vanish if the Nazis aren’t stopped.

My heart, not yet ash, cries out: What kind of justification is that ? Not an eye for an eye, but Vallet and Schaerrer for some possibly futile hope that, one day, the violence will end.

If I look at history, I know—the violence never ends.

—

Béatrice holds on and holds on and won’t let me go. “ Maman, ” she weeps, arms and legs clinging to me like a monkey.

To make her let go, I’d have to hurt her, and I can’t do that—can’t fight against love, because isn’t love what I’m fighting for?

So I stand there with my daughter wrapped around my body, both of us sobbing, until my mother comes in and does what I’m not brave enough to do—she unpeels Béatrice and it feels like being skinned.

I have no idea, standing there saying goodbye, that Béatrice won’t hold me again for two long years.

—

Sometime later, a man appears in the doorway. No, not a man. A magnificent eagle.

We watch each other for a moment before Léon says, “No reply from MI6. Meanwhile, Bla is probably telling the Nazis everything he knows about you.”

“At least he doesn’t know you,” I say, needing to find a glint of silver in the cloud. “Or most of the second wave. And he doesn’t know we’re onto him. So, I’m safe until—”

“Until he finds out,” Léon finishes, jaw rigid with tension.

I push myself up from the chair, watch him physically brace against the argument he’s terrified is coming. But it’s Marie-Madeleine who speaks, not Hérisson. “I can’t talk about Bla tonight. Today has been…” I pause, permit myself one understated word. “Awful. And the problem of Bla will be the same tomorrow whether we argue about it now or not.”

His exhale is frustrated. But he nods, then smiles. “All right. There’s something else I need to debate with you, though. Shouldn’t Alliance’s leader be named after something fiercer than a hedgehog?”

I laugh. “Who else but a ball of prickles could escape the lions?”

Léon laughs too, both of us still on opposite sides of the room. But the awareness of the kiss I blew to him, the one he caught with his hand but not his lips, lives in our eyes, in the gaze we can’t shift from each other. On Léon’s face, there’s an extra crease beside his mouth carved by all the things he wants to tell me but hasn’t. In the curl of his hand, I can see the symphony his fingers want to play through my hair, if only I’d let him. And I can feel the need, like saxophone and flesh, that we have for one another.

Léon says very softly, “I’ve heard more stories than I’ve flown planes about the fabulously beautiful Marie-Madeleine, whom every Alliance agent is in love with. But I’ve never heard anyone describe you as prickly.”

My words fall out into the dusk like stars. “There’s only one man in Alliance who I wish was in love with me.”

“I guarantee you he is.”

Far away in Venezuela, there lives an everlasting lightning storm, where forks of fire endlessly spark. Now, that place is here.

I pick up my suitcase and walk toward him.

—

But first we must drive along the clifftops of the Riviera to our new HQ.

On the way, Léon asks me, “Are you okay? Leaving your daughter—”

“I’m okay.”

“It’s not the same, but I have one brother and five sisters,” Léon tells me. “When I left home at seventeen, my baby sister was only one. She cried like she knew I was going to war. And I remember thinking that if I was lucky enough to come back alive, she’d be a kid, not a baby. And she probably wouldn’t recognize me. But when I got off the train, she was the first person to come scampering over.”

I picture a seventeen-year-old Léon going off to war and then committing his life to fighting for France, and I’m reminded of the difference in our ages—twelve years. But he’s never once imposed his experience on me. So he isn’t just made up of passion and idealism, but of some quality I don’t have a name for—that of happily subordinating himself to a much younger woman because the larger picture is all that matters.

“I wish I could meet your sister,” I say.

“You might,” he tells me. “I recruited her.”

“You can’t let people you love do this!” I cry.

And he says, “There are already people I love doing this.”

That’s when I reach out and touch his jaw. When the pulse in his throat thrums, I stroke that, too.

“Will it make me sound like a schoolboy if I say that I don’t think I can bear your doing that until I know I can do it to you?” he whispers.

There’s no road shoulder to pull onto. If there was, I don’t think either of us would be able to resist.

For now, I have to content myself with imagining the moment when we’re finally together and every time I touch him, he reciprocates.