Page 25 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

24

No One Believes a Piece of Paper Can Be a Noose

The Dordogne, January 1943

Mid-January, MI6 thinks there’s enough moonlight to take Léon to London. After a too-short farewell, he, Magpie, Mahout, and the crew go out to meet the airplane.

Back at the chateau, the rooms gape like mouths waiting to swallow me. Dust chokes my lungs. The spirit of Christmas past is pistol cold against my neck. Even my bones shiver, no matter how much wood I put on the fire.

Time moves like decay in a slow, invisible creep.

Are the Gestapo waiting? Will Léon be shot out of the sky?

Tires crunch over the gravel outside. It’s too soon for Magpie to be back.

I snap off the light, take out my revolver. Hide behind the door.

Footsteps mount the stairs. Advance along the hall.

I slide the safety catch off.

The doorknob rattles.

Thankfully I look before I shoot. It’s Magpie.

“I knew you’d be half dead with anxiety,” he says, “so I took a car to get here more quickly. The moon was full, Eagle is safe, our two policemen are on their way to England, and we have cigarettes. Pall Malls, though. We’ll need to make a pot of tea to wash them down.”

Thank God for Magpie. I take the proffered cigarette, light it with hands still trembling.

“Lucien’s downstairs with money, guns, and messages,” he adds.

“I’ll start on them now.”

It’s two in the morning, but Magpie says, “We’ll help.”

He, Monique, Lucien, and I sit at the kitchen table, fueled by Bee. Magpie and I decode; Lucien and Monique repackage London’s supplies of guns, shoes, and warm clothes for each sector. Come morning, the couriers arrive, ready to transport the packages to Alliance’s sectors.

I jump every time the door opens. I think it’s because I’m waiting for the message to come through telling us that Léon arrived safely, but hours after that message has arrived, I’m still a relentless staccato beat jarring the rhythm of headquarters.

When I look up, I see why. We’re too good at this now.

The Nazis aren’t stupid. Every win must signal to them that we aren’t just a few people. That we’re large, organized, successful.

I turn to Colonel Kauffmann, who’s come in to see if Léon got away, and say, “Find us a new headquarters by tomorrow.”

He lifts his brows. Three weeks ago, we were happily eating Christmas ham. Now I can’t wait to get out of here. I don’t know why. Know only that I’ve left every other HQ too late and people have suffered. Presentiment is crawling like a spider through my gut.

Kauffmann nods, cape swirling behind him as he slips out.

I don’t sleep. I consume cigarettes instead of food. When dawn breaks in shades of ominous gray all over the sky, the spider becomes frantic.

I send Bee to Paris, Elephant to Toulouse. I’ll go with Monique, Magpie, Lucien, and our equipment to the new HQ Kauffmann has found for us.

“Let’s go,” I tell Magpie, who’s still transmitting to London.

“I want to send all your messages first,” he says.

But doom is pressing its hands on my shoulders, trying to hold me here just a little longer.

“Now,” I snap.

The look on Magpie’s face says plainly that I’m losing my nerve or my mind or both.

We load the cars. It takes five too-long minutes.

Above us, hanging like a metaphor, is a huge, dark cloud.

I feel as if I’ve escaped so narrowly I’ve left my shadow behind.

—

My new den is the cathedral in Tulle, a town clinging tenaciously to the sides of the narrow Corrèze valley. We’re welcomed by the Abbé Lair, who sets out mats for us in one of the crypts, and I almost ask if we’re sleeping there because he knows our futures—and prayer isn’t enough to save us.

But I’m too exhausted. We sleep like the dead interred around us.

When I wake, Magpie’s already gone back to the chateau to collect the spare transmitter we couldn’t fit in the car. He returns a few hours later and the instant I see his face, I ask, “What happened?”

When will I stop asking that question? When will I anticipate good, rather than only knowing bad?

“Two farmers stopped me before I got there,” he says. “They said the dust hadn’t even settled from our cars pulling out yesterday when the Gestapo arrived. They tore the place apart searching for a Mrs. Harrison?” He shakes his head. “If I’d gone on transmitting for five more minutes… Mon Dieu . Next time you tell me to leave, I’ll be the first one out.”

Relief, panic, worry—those are the emotions I ought to feel. But laughter spills out. “Mrs. Harrison,” I giggle, and they all stare at me in bewilderment. “Hérisson, my code name. The Gestapo think my name is Mrs. Harrison.”

I don’t know why it’s funny. But if I don’t laugh, then I’ll have to think about the fact that even a week is too long to stay somewhere now, and I’m carrying a baby whose life so far has been made up of prison escapes and close shaves with the Gestapo.

I stop laughing as abruptly as I started. “Radio London,” I tell Magpie. “Find out if the other sectors have called in. Because if the Gestapo found Malfonds—” I cut off the words. “Where can we hang the aerial?”

Abbé Lair points to the belfry, which ordinarily carols the jubilant march of every quarter hour, weddings, Sundays, and devotion.

But it’s not a day for joy.

London tells us the Nice, Marseille, Pau, and Monaco radios have all gone silent.

I stand beneath a statue of Mary Magdalene—whose name I bear—patron saint of women and penitent sinners, my conscience aching. There’s no way the Gestapo just happened upon the chateau. They knew where to look. But how?

Because we invent the idea of resistance every day and, in so doing, we make mistakes.

At Malfonds, I saw an agent write out the address of his HQ for another agent. I ordered them to burn the paper—addresses are never to be written down. That’s been my rule since 1940 when Alliance had just two people, not one thousand like it does now, because we’re dominoes in a chain that leads to prison. One person’s strip search at a railway station with an address in their pocket leads the Gestapo to a house where more people will be found with things in their pockets, and down we all fall.

Until it happens, no one believes a piece of paper can be a noose.

So many couriers came in and out of Malfonds after the Lysander operation. One of them must have carried the Malfonds address in their pocket.

“Radio every sector,” I tell Magpie. “Tell them not to carry anything in writing, not to visit other HQs. They should meet in a bar or a café, always a different one. And…”

I scan my list. The duke moved Paris HQ when he returned from Sarlat. Lyon, where I sent Rivière, is in a new location. My finger stops at Toulouse. Josette and the team have been in the same place since I left Béatrice’s hospital.

“Tell them to clear out,” I say to Magpie.

“I’ll see what I can find out about the rest.” Lucien leaves before I can shout No!

Magpie, Monique, the abbé, and I sit in a silence interrupted only by the scrape of matches, the quick blaze of fire, the inhale and exhale of smoke.

Perhaps the radios have just stopped working? Perhaps the London operator didn’t pick up the signals? Perhaps…perhaps…The word and its attendant fantasies buzz like the deadly mosquitoes Christian warned me about, tempting me to believe.

It’s morning when Lucien returns. He stands before me like Vallet and Schaerrer used to, young and with his future truncated because of me.

“Pau, Nice, Marseille, Monaco, and Toulouse have all been raided,” he says quietly. “Basset”—our Toulouse leader—“was beaten to death. The Boche are driving stakes into our landing field at Thalamy. They found that, too.”

“Your mother?” My voice is hoarse.

“Luckily she was out with Elephant. She’s on her way to Paris to join Coustenoble.”

Thank God. “And Marseille…Rivière’s wife?”

Lucien shakes his head.

The Arabs in Morocco beat their breasts with their grief and I want to hit myself so hard that I black out. Madeleine, with the tap-dancing shoes, is in the hands of the Nazis. And the Gestapo will ask every captured agent for the whereabouts of Mrs. Harrison, Claire de Bacqueville, and Marie-Madeleine. They won’t ask nicely. They’ll commit every kind of violence against my agents in their attempts to track me down.

I can’t let them beat Madeleine Rivière.

I scribble a message to London asking them to alert all transmitters still operating and to send Léon back at the next full moon. “Have them send this out on the BBC,” I tell Magpie. The sentence reads: Marie-Madeleine has arrived safely in London and sends you her affectionate greetings.

“You’re going to London?” Magpie asks. The look on his face states plainly that I have, at last, gone mad—there are no Lysander operations scheduled until February.

Monique answers for me. “No. We just want the Germans to think she has.”

I nod. “They’ll stop torturing agents for my location. It’ll buy us some time to run.”

But where?

Only Bordeaux, Paris, Brittany, and Normandy are still sending messages. And London replies that Léon is in Algiers meeting with General Giraud, head of the French armed forces, and won’t be back until the March moon. I curse. Alliance needs its chief of staff. We have to rebuild, find new agents.

London’s final words are: If you persist undoubtedly arrested stop take the February Lysander stop awaiting you impatiently end

I crumple the paper in my hand. “The Nazis know I’ve previously been in Pau, Marseille, the Dordogne, Toulouse. They’ll be waiting for me in all of those places. What’s happening in Lyon?”

“Their transmitter is operating irregularly,” Magpie tells me.

“Lyon?” Monique repeats, my brave friend as goggle-eyed as if I’d suggested Berlin. “That’s like…”

“Walking into the lion’s den,” I finish.

Lyon is the center of Resistance activity in France. Because of that, the Gestapo and the Abwehr outnumber the churches, and résistants are tortured by Klaus Barbie with the frequency of Nazi goose steps.

But Rivière is there and the sector is still operating. I have no connection to the city. Perhaps the Gestapo will overlook it.

My newfound courage is almost shattered by the arrival of Colonel Kauffmann.

“My wife,” he says, and then he starts to cry in front of us. “My brothers,” he goes on. “My radio operator. My couriers. Everyone. Taken by the Gestapo.”

My God. How many more will we lose in the first month of 1943?

“The Gestapo said they’ll release my wife if I give myself up.” Kauffmann’s voice thunders through the crypt.

Food I haven’t eaten presses up into my throat. I swallow, can’t be sick, not now; it’s not my turn. Who bargains with human lives?

Monsters.

I drop to my knees, take Kauffmann’s hands in mine. How can anyone agree to leave their wife in the hands of torturers? But how can someone as senior as Kauffmann give himself up? It would be the same as marching almost everyone in Alliance into Gestapo headquarters.

Perhaps his wife is worth that much. Who am I to judge?

We’re in a holy place, but I don’t pray. Prayers are useless words that have never once stopped a bullet that has you in its sights. I speak the truth and leave the rest to the colonel—knowing I’ll hate myself for it later.

“I need a chief of staff until Eagle is back,” I tell him. “Someone to help me rebuild. I’d hoped it would be you.”

I look up at him like a repentant daughter on her knees before her father. No daughter has ever repented like I do.

After a beat, the colonel nods. “Very good, Madame. We’ll go to Lyon.”

I hope his wife knows how brave her husband is.

—

Until the message goes out on the BBC tonight, the Germans will still be looking for me. So I send Kauffmann, Monique, and Lucien to take the train to Montpellier and then on to Lyon. Magpie and I will take the train going north, which leaves an hour later. We’re readying to depart when Lucien returns.

My stomach contracts as if I’m about to have the baby. “Why are you back?”

“The train passed a German convoy,” he tells me. “So I jumped out and came back to warn you. They’ve surrounded Tulle, put up roadblocks, and are checking everyone going to the station.”

We’re trapped.

“You shouldn’t have come,” I tell Lucien furiously.

He looks almost offended. “Eagle told me my most important job while he was gone was to take care of you.”

It’s a promise that might get Lucien killed, the boy who, two years ago, couldn’t speak to me without blushing. Today, he’s saved my life—for now.

My heart is racing and so is my breath, and it’s bad for the baby but I can’t think of anything except the terror I feel in this room in Tulle with a priest, a boy, and an Englishman, with Nazis outside everywhere, and me, the sheep whose throat they want to slit.

“I’ll get the doctor,” the Abbé says.

At first I think I must look as ill as I feel. But the doctor is one of our agents. So yes, maybe he can help.

Lucien, Magpie, and I wait, white-faced. We can hear Nazis shouting not far away.

Footsteps. As always, we brace, but it’s the Abbé and the doctor. He takes one look at me and says, “My Ausweis lets me transport patients day and night, Madame. Magpie can be your worried husband. You won’t have to act at all to play the part of a patient.”

“And Lucien? Just as you promised Commandant Faye,” I say, turning to Lucien, “so I promised your mother.”

I didn’t—Josette would never let me make that kind of vow. But I’ll happily lie to keep this boy alive.

“He can stay in my rooms until they’ve taken down the roadblocks,” the doctor says. “A bandaged leg and notes about gangrene ought to keep the Germans away.”

I hug Lucien and the Abbé, tell him to leave Tulle, too, and off we go. By the time we reach the checkpoint, perspiration bathes my face and my whole body is trembling. But the doctor is calm—another of those moments of bravery I’ll never forget.

The Nazis shine their flashlights into the car.

Magpie is sitting on the transmitter. They’ll see it. They’ll ask him to step out.

They’ll recognize me.

“I might faint,” I whisper.

Magpie begins to exclaim that I’m about to die in an extravagant manner that proves our British gentleman has many sides to him. Our performance must work, because the Nazis wave us through. Nobody breathes as the barricades are pulled away.

Above us, the moon is a guillotine blade ready to fall.