Page 28 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

27

I Named Him Achille

Paris, July 1943

I scan the platform for Tiger’s face, thankful I was wrong at Malfonds all those months ago—I will see Couscous again. I know Léon won’t be there; it’s too risky. But Couscous would never miss the chance, now that we’re in the same part of the country, to escort me to headquarters.

But when I step down, it’s Magpie who greets me.

“He has tuberculosis,” Magpie says, reaching for my hand.

Another thing I’ve known but pretended not to: that I’ve given Couscous to this war, too.

Couscous had also known, and it was why he wouldn’t rest or seek help.

“Where is he?” I ask.

“In a hospital in the Massif Central. Josette is with him.”

I’m so glad they have each other—another couple forged by war. I can’t risk ending his life earlier than the tuberculosis will by appearing at the hospital and bringing the Gestapo with me.

What do you say when you once would pray Please, God but no longer have faith in any higher power bringing mercy to those who deserve it?

You let your heart whisper I love you, Couscous and hope that his gut, always as highly strung as my own, can feel it.

—

Paris is like another Shanghai, bicycles everywhere—bicycles and poverty. Magpie and I make our way through my once-shining city to visit his orchestra: six transmitters hidden in different locations.

“I thought Tuba should have some friends. So this”—he gestures to the transmitter in the corner—“is Harp. I also have Flute, Flageolet, Ocarina, and Banjo.”

“Ocarina?” I say, smiling. “So there is a sentimental soul hiding beneath the pragmatism—a man who makes orchestras out of Morse.”

“Just doing my bit to keep the romance alive,” he says quietly, then blurts, “How’s Ermine?”

“She misses you,” I say, because I want at least one moment to belong to Monique and Magpie and the thing between them that they’re scared of. Monique hadn’t said specifically that she missed Magpie, but she talked about him every day of the two weeks we spent together.

His smile is the absent light Paris needs, but it fades as he turns to the practicalities, explaining how his system works. The sets are located equidistant around Paris—I’ve made sure each operator in our major sectors has been given two, three, or four transmitters to do the same. The operators carry around only their microphotographed operating schedules and the crystals they need to work their sets.

The Gestapo has perfected its method of tracking and capture, and wireless operators now have the shortest lives of anyone in the Resistance. A transmission longer than twenty minutes gives the Gestapo the general coordinates of the radio. A second transmission of the same length from the same location allows them to track it to the exact street. The third has them sending in three detector cars, which are placed in a triangle on the street to zero in on the precise building.

We know to be on the lookout for wires traveling down the necks of men because those wires signal a Nazi operating the portable detector that will bring the Gestapo to the apartment door. Then the radio operator is captured and tortured, more arrests are made, and finally, they’re put to death.

It’s a chillingly efficient system for murder.

Magpie starts cursing—he rarely swears and I’m immediately on edge.

“It’s taken me ten minutes to rouse London,” he says, face sheened with sweat. Meaning he has only ten minutes left to transmit everything. But our stack of messages will take twice that long.

I can’t operate a radio. But I can keep time. After nine more minutes, I tell him to stop. We take a vélo taxi to the next house and resume the process. As he taps the Morse, I think about the other sets around France—Adagio at Rennes, Harmonium at Carentan, Clarinet at Nantes, Scherzo at Autun, and the sets in Caen and Cherbourg, Louviers and Brittany, Bordeaux and La Rochelle. Together, they make music every day, a carefully timed symphony of coded letters played for freedom.

But if they play for just one minute longer than their twenty minutes of grace, our enemy will always win.

—

Headquarters is now a luxury apartment on Rue Francois 1er that’s been loaned to us by a friend. Silk carpets adorn the floors and Aubusson tapestries and Renaissance art hang on the walls. After having lived in a brothel for a fortnight, this feels like a palace.

“Marie-Madeleine!” Maurice—who’s refused to stay in his safe house—shouts when he sees me.

I throw my arms around the duke. “You should take the Lysander to London—”

He cuts me off. “So should you.”

All I can do is shake my head. “Is it true that you got away because of your tattoo?”

He throws back his head and laughs, and Marguerite takes up the tale. “We escaped out the back when the Gestapo raided us, but we ran straight into a den of thieves. Luckily they were thieves who hated Nazis. When they saw the tiger on his forearm, they thought he was an underworld figure who should be looked after lest he toss them into the Seine. They hid us somewhere revolting but very safe.”

Well, I gave birth in a brothel …I can’t make the joke. I don’t even know how many people beyond the tight circle of Monique, Magpie, Léon, Lucien, and Ladybug knew I was expecting. And if I even think of my son, let alone speak of him, I’m terrified of what might break.

So I wrap my arms again around two people who should be taking one of our escape routes to safety but who are still running Paris HQ. And I hear myself say, “Let’s go out for dinner.”

“Dinner?” Maurice stares as if I’ve said I want to go to prison.

“Choose one of the blackest of all black-market restaurants. Somewhere packed with Germans. They’d never think I’d dare to dine among them.”

“Dinner,” the duke repeats, eyes fixed on me, and I wonder what he sees. The red hair that Monique cut into a bob. The frame that’s ten kilos lighter than it used to be.

The pain in my eyes.

“Let’s go out for dinner,” he agrees.

We walk along the footpaths of a Paris whose vanished statues and silent bells and lopped trees are interposed with women whose hats are decorated with a red ribbon, a white flower, and a blue feather—pride and spirit stitched with a couturier’s thread.

Outside the brasserie, there’s a man waiting. He has gray hair and a monstrously stooped back. We cannot clutch each other out here on a public sidewalk and I cannot tell him the name of his son nor the color of his eyes, because then Léon’s legs will buckle—hearts can take only so much pain before they toss you on the ground. So we just smile, and our eyes promise, later, and in we go—the hunchback, the redhead, the Englishman, the tattooed former flying ace, and his wife.

“Am I supposed to be your arthritic grandfather?” Léon murmurs, the back of his hand brushing mine.

“What does that make him?” I indicate Magpie. “My father?”

Magpie, who’s six years younger than me, rolls his eyes, and suddenly it’s like one of those carefree nights from before the war that we thought would unspool forever. Music, laughter, and tables crowd this restaurant that’s exactly as I requested: steak, chips, and caviar, with a side of Nazis.

The waiter brings us two bottles of Beaujolais, and Léon lifts his glass and calls out to the Germans at the next table, “Your health, gentlemen!”

A laugh escapes me. What are we doing? Just what we need to, perhaps. My eyes catch Léon’s and in them I see exactly what sits at the back of mine—shame, marbled with pain.

We’ve left our child to be raised by others for an unknowable period of time.

But here in this room filled with a hundred Nazis, men who’ve killed my friends, I know I can’t keep recalling the tiny fist wrapped around my finger and fight the Germans, too. A moment’s inattention from me and three thousand people will die—because that’s how big Alliance is now. And as surely as I know that I love my newborn son, I know that the Allies’ invasion plans will be delayed without the information we send them—and then thousands more will die in those extra months or years that the Germans are allowed to rule over France.

So I pick up the menu and say, with just the faintest trace of a quiver in my voice, “I haven’t eaten caviar in three years.”

“Then we’ll order caviar,” Marguerite says.

So we eat caviar and drink Beaujolais and the night is full of humor and warmth and love until right near the end, when we all fall silent at the same time and I feel the ghosts of our dead or captured comrades take a seat beside us, place their hands on our shoulders, and say, Gather your strength. The worst is still to come.

—

Léon walks me to my new lair where, as soon as the door is closed behind us, he wraps his arms around me. Caught between us is the ghost of our child.

Léon’s shoulders are shaking through the awful hunchback coat as if he’s imagining a teenage boy hurling words at him: You weren’t there when I was born. You didn’t meet me for months. So I don’t cry, not now.

“Come and lie down,” I whisper.

I slide off his coat and slip off my dress. I’m still bleeding from the birth, but I need my ankles to wind around his, our elbows to lock together, our torsos to touch. Just like the scent and warmth of skin calms a baby, I want my soul to tell Léon’s that everything will be all right.

I trace my fingertips over his chest like I did the first time I lay in a bed in Le Lavandou and drew the tattoos of my love onto his skin. “I named him Achille,” I whisper. “It’s one of Christian’s middle names, and anyone born in war needs the name of a warrior. He’s so like you. I don’t think there’s much of me in him at all. It’s like—”

I halt, paralyzed by what I’d been about to say. It’s like he’s the future Léon . Which would mean the man beside me now is only the past or the present, but I have to believe he’s my future, too.

Despite every effort, a tear slides down my cheek. Léon raises himself to his elbow and threads his hand into mine, eyes the same as they were when I met him in Vichy three years ago, glittering with stars.

“Marry me,” he says urgently. “Whatever Méric thought about divorce before the war, he won’t think now. He’s fighting in North Africa on our side. He never joined the Germans. War will have shown him how petty grudges are.”

It’s perhaps just another dream to imagine that I truly can engage myself to Léon, but there’s still so much space inside me to hold on to dreams. It’s how I was raised—to believe in more than seems possible.

It’s why I’m still here beyond the time I thought I could endure.

I pull Léon’s head down to mine and kiss him like I’ve never kissed him before. When he draws back, he says huskily, “I’m looking forward to when you’re recovered. But in the meantime…” He looks uncertain. “I don’t know if that was a no or a yes.”

“Marie-Madeleine Faye,” I say, grinning.

Léon kisses my neck so hard that it tickles, and I laugh, head tipped back, the sound accompanying the symphony of radios tapping out optimism all over France.