Page 27 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

26

My Court Is a Brothel

Lyon, May–June 1943

“Marie-Madeleine,” I hear a voice say. “Minerva.”

I bolt upright in bed, terrified, then realize it’s Léon. His inhale is even more shocked than mine. “There’s nothing left of you,” he says, crossing the room in two strides and wrapping me in his arms.

That’s when I cry. I cry and I cry and I cry like I’ve never cried before.

I don’t know how many minutes pass before I realize I haven’t even said hello, have done nothing other than sob. At last I look up, and laughter—strange, wild, incredible laughter—spills out.

Léon is an old man with white hair, a hunchback, and spectacles. I push my own hideous disguise—red wefts of hair—out of my face and Léon smiles.

“What a pair we make,” he says wryly.

“Who made you up like this?” I ask through still-violent fits of giggles.

“The chief makeup man at MI6,” he tells me, shrugging off the hunchback, which I can see now is a device fitted into a coat. He pulls off the gray wig and the spectacles and unfurls to his usual height.

“Does that make me Esmeralda?” I ask, trying to keep the lightness here with us.

Léon shakes his head vehemently. “Our story will have a happier ending than a Victor Hugo novel, Minerva.”

Now I’m crying again, and maybe he is too, because the words have come out with such certainty I almost believe them.

Béatrice and Christian are with the Amitié Chrétienne. Tomorrow, go to Ladybug’s house at midday. Stay by the window. Ermine.

I’m lost in the clouds, barely know where the ground is, or the sky, as I leave the clinic—per Monique’s note—for the first time in weeks. My focus narrows to Ladybug’s window and I ignore the tea she sets beside me. Luckily she refrains from ordering me to drink it; I can’t keep anything down.

Then, on the street below, a familiar blond head. Monique, holding the hands of two children. One is a boy. The other a girl. Both have worried looks on their faces, but when Monique says something, they smile.

She doesn’t look up. If someone is watching, the slightest gesture in my direction is like hanging a sign with my name on it over the door for the Gestapo to see. All I can do is hope they can feel what’s pouring out through the glass: a love so expressive that if all the instruments in the world came together to play, it still wouldn’t be enough.

Mes chéris. My darlings.

Sometime this week, they’ll be smuggled into Switzerland by the peasant guides who live near the border and who now convey people for a living. There they’ll stay for a length of time so uncertain it’s like time has become meaningless. It won’t be weeks or even months. If the Allies were invading that soon, I would know.

It won’t be this summer.

I’m not even certain it will be this year.

I slide onto the nearest chair. Invasion has always hung before me like the sun teasing an airplane into believing it’s possible to land on its surface. But it’s still a mirage.

What I can see on the street right now is no mirage, though. So I press my forehead to the glass and take in every detail.

Christian is almost as tall as Monique. And Béatrice’s stride looks so comfortable, as if she has no pain at all. There’s still the faintest trace of a dimple in her cheek, and I memorize that because it will be gone the next time I see her.

What if this is the last time?

There isn’t enough air. My lungs pump, but the enormity of what my children are about to do stops the breath from getting in. For the first time I wonder—can I really save them all? Léon. Béatrice. Christian. The baby. France. And if I have to choose between them, whom should I save?

How can anyone make such a choice?

I pound the glass. “Look up!” I scream. “Look at me!”

The words die as they hit the double-glazed window.

Monique moves on, the children’s hands tucked in hers. I can no longer see their profiles. I can no longer see their hair. All I have left is an impression of height, a stride, and a dimple.

—

The words Léon is saying are impossible. That cannot, can never, have happened. There’s no ground beneath my feet, only a void, and I fall down in a dead faint to a place that’s dark and cold, where the ground is covered in the tiny jagged pieces of my broken heart.

“Minerva! Wake up!”

No.

“La patronne!”

The void draws away. Yes, Léon knows exactly the words to use to rouse me. I blink back to consciousness to find him whispering my name, kneeling on the floor beside me—a pillar to rest my desolation upon.

Everything he said five minutes ago echoes appallingly in my mind.

A message came though. The border was overrun with Nazi patrols. The guides refused to cross. So…

Léon has no children except the one in my belly, but even he could hardly bring himself to finish: They pointed Béatrice and Christian in the direction of Switzerland, he’d said. And they…they told them to go on alone.

To go on alone. Across no-man’s-land. Past the guns. Through the barbed wire.

A dimple in a cheek. A little girl’s stride. A young boy’s height.

Léon is saying two words over and over. My ears cling to them, finally process them into meaning.

“They’re alive,” he’s saying. “They’re alive. They’re in a Swiss refugee camp.”

The void almost opens up again, but Léon takes hold of my cheeks and says, “Don’t you dare,” and I realize I’ve frightened him more than he’s ever been scared, even in a trench facing a gun.

How did two unaccompanied children make it through a patrolled border zone and into a refugee camp?

“They’re ten and twelve,” I whisper. “Just ten and twelve.”

“They are their mother’s children,” he says.

Which is appallingly true. If they weren’t my children, they’d never have had to face such danger in the first place. Yet face it they did. So how dare I lie down on a floor when my children did not lie down and let horror overwhelm them.

I push myself up yet again, hope that I can get a message to Yvonne so she can find my children, take them out of the camp and on to the house in Switzerland.

—

More than one hundred Nazi U-boats are patrolling the seas now, and London’s appetite for intelligence about them is insatiable: We can only send the Allied armada if we can get the supplies safely to Britain to build the armada, Crane writes from London. So we surround our man Stosskopf and the seamstress Scallop with an entirely new network peopled by Triton, Cod, and Lobster, and our sea creatures deliver and deliver and deliver.

Until…

Monique doesn’t arrive at the clinic at her scheduled time. In a prewar life, a friend’s lateness meant you’d just order another coffee. Now, it’s a warning.

Something is wrong.

Something is always wrong.

I’m so pregnant I can hardly move. I look like a twelve-year-old with a distended belly and have a limp so pronounced that everyone comments on it now. But I limp and pace until the telephone rings.

Monique whispers, “I’ve hurt my foot. I won’t be able to come out.”

Then she hangs up.

It’s our code phrase. Someone’s been arrested.

But who?

I want to scream. I’m so useless, can’t run to the house—I can barely walk. I can only pace, limp, worry.

God bless the fearless women in my network. It’s only about two hours later before Monique appears, gasping for air.

“Eagle, Cricket, and Magpie have been arrested,” she says between each rapid inhale. “By Vichy, though, not the Gestapo. The police kept me at the house because they didn’t think I was a threat. I slipped out the back when I told them I needed to use the bathroom.”

Thank God we’re women. Thank God the world believes us to be nothing.

But three of the people who know the most about Alliance, besides me, have been arrested. The father of my child has been arrested.

Monique’s face says it all. “You need to leave Lyon. If you’re caught as well, it’ll be the end of Alliance.”

I shake my head ferociously, remember my vow: If the Nazis are going to burn my women, then I will watch those Nazis go up in flames.

“Find Ladybug,” I say, voice as sharp as a military tattoo. “Tell her to warn everyone in Lyon to move to a safe house or leave the city. I’ll go somewhere the Nazis will never think to look.” I pause for only a second. “Like a brothel. At least two madams in the city give us information. Ask if they’ll house me.”

So Monique leaves to find me a bed in a brothel.

I check my watch. Where are you, Léon? How long does it take to escape prison? And how ridiculous that I actually consider there might be an average time span for such a thing. If it was anyone other than Léon, I’d be thinking of numbers—this is his third time in prison. The number three, he once told me, is cursed. If three men lit their cigarettes from the same match in the Great War, it gave the enemy time to see the flame and shoot.

But Eagle is the fourth leaf of the clover. Perennially, ridiculously lucky.

More hours pass. Hours of my heavy belly, too many cigarettes; my uneven footsteps clicking like rosaries at a prayer vigil. Light moves in shades of white-yellow-gold over the sky. Then sienna, gray. Now black.

Night falls.

A burst of running footsteps. My God, is it my turn now?

I flee to the window. Will my belly fit through? I’ll have to make it fit, make my limping, aching hip stretch enough to fling my leg up to the sill.

Before I can, the door crashes open and my heart almost bursts apart.

Léon!

He collapses on the bed, face awash with sweat, lungs sucking air, desperate to speak but utterly unable to.

So I swallow my fears, pretend I’m not the Nazis’ most-wanted woman in the entire country, and lie down next to him, my stomach between us the size of the moon. I rest my hand on his chest, feel how fast his heart beats as he lifts one arm above his head, exhales, and manages to say, “I escaped.”

“Shhh,” I say, stroking his face.

Two minutes of his breath slowing, my hand soothing.

“We were having lunch,” he finally says. “The police broke in—Vichy, thank Christ, not the Gestapo. We told them we were with Vichy Intelligence and were outraged by our arrests. The inspector began to doubt that he’d arrested the right people. While he waited for orders to come from the Germans, we realized the main door of the police station was wide open. The minute he left the room to make a call, we walked to the door, told the guard we were just going out to get some food—he had no idea who we were—and once we reached the corner, we ran like the devil.”

“Thank God for bureaucratic incompetence.”

The baby kicks as if it shares the same sentiment, and I laugh, taking Léon’s hand and placing it on my stomach.

“And thank God for this little one,” he says.

“You’ll have to think of a few embellishments for that story when you tell it to everyone. That you walked out of prison to get some lunch is hardly the stuff of legend.”

He laughs, too, and while he’s momentarily joyful, I say, “You and the others have to leave Lyon. When the Nazis find out that you escaped again, they’ll blockade the city.”

“I know.”

“I can’t travel,” I whisper. “It’s only a week before the baby comes.”

He moves his hand from my stomach and cups the back of my neck, drawing me in as close as my belly will allow.

Moments later, there’s a light tap on the door, a signal from my nurse, whose code name is Cat.

“Bonjour, Monsieur,” she says to Léon, as if it’s perfectly normal for a fugitive to be lying on a bed next to a very pregnant Resistance leader in a women’s clinic. “I’ll get you some food.”

Food. Water. The army of people who succor you. Nobody ever thinks about those things when they think of war. They think of guns and ammunition, but if nobody’s fed you, you can’t hold a gun.

When Cat returns, Léon devours everything as fast as he can. Then Cat tells me, “Your friend is ready for you, Madame.”

Monique is back. We’re off to a brothel.

Léon and I have time for one quick embrace. I pack a clean dress, underwear, my gun—I’ve long ago stopped thinking about lipstick—before Monique and I slip away. Outside, the night is unpopulated by stars and hides an army of hostile shadows.

—

A flurry of notes passes between Ladybug, Monique, and me. The Gestapo have barricaded the city, having finally worked out that I’m not in London, but Lyon.

They’re tearing the city apart, furious that Noah’s Ark has once again sailed off into hiding. They’ve tortured and deported the police inspector who let Léon slip through his fingers. They’ve captured Ladybug’s daughter. But Ladybug is indomitable and throws herself into contacting her Red Cross friends and asking if we can use their ambulances, which are rarely searched by the Germans, to spirit Kauffmann, Magpie, Léon, and herself to Paris. I don’t have the chance to say goodbye.

But Ladybug didn’t say goodbye to her daughter, either.

The new HQ it’s taken me five months to build has been destroyed. It’s summer 1943, the juncture I convinced myself I needed to make it to. But the invasion isn’t here. And Monique and I are alone in Lyon under the protection of the ladies of the night.

Aren’t we all ladies of the night now?

I don’t know why the baby wants to come into this world, but he does, determinedly so. The prostitutes, who’ve been forced to service Germans every day for years, put on an epic performance the night my labor begins, screaming their pleasure at the top of their lungs to hide the noises I can’t keep in. I’m biting the cleanest sheet Monique could find, but childbirth is all-consuming, especially when you’re an anxious ruin and too thin besides.

“Oh, yes!” I hear screamed through the walls and I scream too, but my scream is curse rather than fulfillment.

Soon my cries aren’t even from the pain, but from the exhaustion and the doubt that I have the strength to do this.

“You can,” Monique says stubbornly, letting me crush her hand in mine.

The easiest thing would be to lie back and close my eyes and finally go to sleep. To sleep so deeply that I don’t dream of pink heather—that I don’t dream at all.

Instead I pace, hip hitching and popping—another pain to distract me—until I can’t move, and then I stand with my forehead leaning against the bedpost, arms wrapped around it, letting it hold me up as the waves of pain push the baby down and down and finally into Monique’s waiting hands.

“It’s a boy!” she says, beaming.

He howls, protesting the world he’s burst into. Every woman in the house lets loose too, and suddenly I find myself smiling at the ridiculousness of it all.

I’ve just given birth in a brothel. There’s a price on my head. My lover, the father of this gorgeous boy, isn’t here with me. And yet I’m so happy I want to fling open the windows and shout my joy into the night.

Monique attends to the afterbirth, having helped four older sisters deliver babies in years past. Then she slips out of the room, leaving me alone with my son.

He’s so beautiful.

He has a scattering of hair, dark like his father’s. He has a devilish set to his countenance, like his father’s. And he has passion like his father. Listen to those lungs! I bring him to my breast and he quiets, lids closing over bright blue eyes the color of Moroccan afternoon skies.

Will Léon and I ever travel back to those skies with the son we’ve made together? Will he know his half-brother and half-sister?

For too many nights I’ve shivered in my bed from fear and doubt. Tonight, I cling to belief the same way my son clings to my finger for safety, my breast for food, my body for comfort. I believe in everything. I see it all as if it were real.

Béatrice’s dimple. Christian’s height. Léon’s smile when he sees the baby’s eyes. All of us standing, astonished, in the red dirt of Morocco beneath a sky whose color can’t be named because it’s one part sapphire, another part smalt, with a wash of liberty blue.

—

I let myself have that one night with my son. I let him sleep, wake, feed, and make tiny baby sounds beside me until dawn pushes the sun up into the sky.

Then I weep.

How many tears live inside me? Seven oceans’ worth and more. They come out now, drowning Marie-Madeleine the mother. She slips below the surface, the waves closing over her as I tell Monique the god-awful truth.

“I can’t keep him with me. I can’t run from city to city with a baby in my arms.”

“I’ll take him to a safe house in the south,” Monique says. “I’ll look after him.”

“I can’t ask you to do that—”

She holds up one adamant hand. “I told you I’d do whatever it takes to make sure love survives the Nazis. This is what it takes.”

The queen of the animals, the duke of Magenta called me. My subjects have teeth and talons, my court is a brothel, but my God, I’ve never known love like this—my animals are all blue whales, their hearts the largest that exist on earth.

—

My breasts are aching as the train draws into Paris. Today I will lead a Resistance network and tonight I will pump milk from my breasts because I cannot feed my son. I’m bleeding, milk-heavy yet empty, and nobody can know about any of it. Nobody can know that every time my eyes close, I see my son’s tiny fist wrapped around my finger as if he knew from the day he was born that I would leave him.

The train draws into the Gare de Lyon in Paris with a defeated exhale and I leave behind the mother who has no children and become, once more, Hérisson.