Page 29 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

28

He’s Either a Fool or a Traitor

Paris, July 1943

Even though Paris is the most Gestapo-infested city in France, the days pass in exuberant peace compared to the chaos of Lyon. My new set of identity papers declare that I’m Pamela Trotaing, yet another name in a life full of them. Under that guise, I run Alliance HQ from one office while the duke of Magenta runs Paris HQ from the office beside. I stand in front of my maps with my hands on my hips, daring France to try to get the better of me. And I get things done.

I have Mahout find a new landing field for the Lysander pickups, one that’s closer to Paris. I assign Ladybug to manage the addresses we use for letterboxes and safe houses, tell Kauffmann to get his security team to retrieve some papers Léon left in Lyon and to evacuate Elephant, who’s still trapped in a safe house there. I look at microphotographs of sections of a map that Dragon sends me from Normandy, the map he was working on with Couscous until Couscous became too ill, a map that makes me smile. This is exactly what the Allies need. I send him more men so he can document everything faster, tell MI6 to get ready because soon we’ll have everything they require.

It’s all going so well until the agents from Kauffmann’s security team come back from Lyon with only the films Monique had hidden the day the police arrested everyone.

“Where are Léon’s reports?” I ask Kauffmann.

“Bumpkin and Lanky said that’s all there was,” he replies, his cape looking threadbare today, and I make a note to ask Ladybug to find some fabric to have it mended, because that cape is emblematic of the noble spirit of Alliance.

But first, the missing documents. I confer with Léon, who looks similarly worried.

“I’ve worked with Kauffmann long enough to know he’s telling the truth,” Léon says. “But if those documents are in the wrong hands…”

I ask a terrible question. “Is it possible an Alliance agent took them?”

Léon doesn’t ask, To do what? We both know I’m talking about traitors again. The Gestapo would pay someone a lot of money for those papers.

“Go to London,” Léon says suddenly. “MI6 is ordering you to go. They know as well as you do that the Gestapo’s most-wanted woman in the country shouldn’t be in Paris, especially if someone’s trading those papers with the Nazis.”

“Not now. Now when I’ve only just gotten everything working smoothly again.”

Léon’s exhale is frustrated. “Then will you at least go everywhere with a bodyguard? Please?”

I acquiesce so he feels he’s had a win of sorts.

From then on I’m accompanied everywhere by Pierre Dayné, a family friend who’s been working for Alliance since my first trip to Paris in 1941, and who also works with the French secret police. He can pretend I’m a prisoner under arrest if there’s any sign of trouble, which will get us through roadblocks and identity checks.

Not long after, Bertie Albrecht, the woman who helped start the Combat resistance network, is arrested. The news causes a council of war at HQ.

“It’s rumored she was beheaded,” Léon says to me in a voice so abrupt I’m silenced. His hands are shaking when he adds, “My God, that must never happen to you.”

Kauffmann, Elephant, Magpie, Lucien, and Rivière all nod in furious agreement.

I press my hand to my mouth. “They wouldn’t…” I imagine Béatrice and Christian finding out later that their mother had had her head put to the sword. “Excuse me.”

I lock myself in the bathroom.

Léon doesn’t even wait a minute before he raps on the door. “You need to go to London,” he says through the wood.

“No,” I say. “An absent figurehead is—”

“Better than a dead one,” he cuts in with quiet fury. “Minerva, I know you decide everything with your heart, and I love you for that, but this time, please decide with your head. Because I want you to keep it.”

I open the door because his voice is too loud. I know he’s scared. Or maybe he’s angry. But not at me.

“Not yet,” I say, fixing my eyes on him.

“Promise me,” he says in an urgent whisper, “that if one more thing happens, you’ll go.”

“I’ll go if anything more happens to the network,” I say, which isn’t exactly the same thing, and he exhales with both frustration that I didn’t promise more and relief that I promised something.

I should know by now that these things don’t come in trickles, but in floods. Jean Moulin, De Gaulle’s head of Resistance activities in France, is the next to be arrested. Not just arrested, but tortured and killed by Klaus Barbie in Lyon. And I thank God that I left Lyon when I did, that the baby hadn’t come a month later.

Hérisson, you’re needed in London, the message comes through from MI6 again. Léon watches me as I crumple it in my fist.

The next day, Bumpkin arrives at HQ with the news that Elephant was caught on his way to Marseille with all our forging equipment.

“How the hell did you let that happen?” Léon barks.

“I thought it was a simple job,” Bumpkin says miserably. “So I gave it to Buccaneer and Lanky. Lanky was the lookout, and on his way to the meeting place, he saw the Gestapo nearby. So he ran to the tram stop to warn Elephant—”

I explode. “The tram stop! He thought Elephant was coming by trolley car with three transmitting sets, stacks of identity forms, explosives, and guns? Was Lanky really trying to warn him or was he running away like a coward? Lookouts never leave their post. Because this is what happens when they do!”

“He’s a smart kid,” Bumpkin says. “He panicked. He wants to apologize to you in person.”

“Not a chance,” Léon snaps.

I agree. Nobody except Alliance’s top lieutenants and most trusted couriers know the address of HQ.

“Then he’s either a fool or a traitor,” I tell Bumpkin. “You’re forbidden to bring him anywhere near headquarters. And you’re forbidden to ever delegate a security job involving an Alliance lieutenant again.”

Bumpkin’s trembling. These boys are all so young. They don’t understand consequence. But when Bumpkin’s gone, Léon confesses the biggest consequence of all.

“Elephant had my duplicate notebook,” he tells me. “He took it before I left Lyon in case I was caught on the way to Paris. It’s in code, but it lists addresses of safe houses and HQs and letterboxes.” He pauses. “They’ll torture him for the key to the code. And he won’t tell them anything.”

Which means the torture will be worse than anything that’s happened before.

Elephant has two daughters here in Paris.

“Everyone’s still talking to everyone else, delegating when they ought to be doing,” I say despairingly, stopping when Kauffmann hurries in.

“They’re very sorry, Madame,” he says to me, clearly having just spoken to Bumpkin. “Give them a chance.”

He looks so much like a liege on bended knee that my anger dissipates a little. “I’ll give them one more chance,” I tell him. “Confine them to Lyon for now. They can run Rivière’s security, get more experience.”

As soon as Kauffmann’s gone, Léon pounces. “You told me that if one more thing happened to the network, you’d go to London.”

“Let me sleep on it,” I say, and he growls in frustration.

But I don’t sleep. My mind is a hornet’s nest. I can’t abandon Alliance. But nor can I let myself be caught. If that happens—and it isn’t egotistical to say it—Alliance won’t survive. A goddess and her worshippers, Léon had said to me at Christmas. I’m no goddess, but I know I’m Alliance’s heart. You cut out a creature’s heart and it dies.

It’s already thrashing.

The following afternoon, Lucien appears at HQ even though he should be in the south. He tells us the Gestapo surrounded the house he was staying in. He just managed to escape out the back.

“They knew my code name,” he tells me.

The creature flails.

Is someone talking? Are these things just accidents? Or—are we the kill, cornered by the mistakes we didn’t know we were making?

“You’re going to London on the next Lysander,” I tell Lucien. “MI6 wants to give you more training. After a month of looking, the Gestapo will give up. Then you can return.”

“London?” He whoops the way we all used to, back when we had a headquarters in Pau and nobody had died and Coustenoble and Schaerrer and Vallet were a tricolor and Lucien just a fifteen-year-old boy nursing a harmless crush. “I’ve always wanted to see London.”

Dayné, my bodyguard, appears, ready to escort me back to my secret apartment. I escape with him, Léon’s eyes drilling into my back. Two things have happened now, not just one. And I’m still not leaving.

We take our seats on the Métro. At the next station, a man sits opposite, and it takes only a moment for me to realize I know him. An officer acquaintance of Navarre’s, one who snubbed me in Vichy and who’s since been working for Laval.

He blinks and, despite the red hair, recognition crosses his face.

I’m seconds away from being caught.

Dayné yanks me to my feet and we make it out through the train doors a millisecond before they close and we’re chopped in two.

“He’ll pull the emergency brake,” Dayné yells. “Run!”

Métro stations have more stairs than the Eiffel Tower, and my strength isn’t what it should be. But I throw myself at each step in a frenzy.

We make it back to headquarters, where I collapse into a chair. Before Léon can say anything, I tell him, “I’m going to London.”

—

July 18 is the date set for me to fly out. On the night of July 16, I dream of pink heather: Léon and Magpie stepping out of a Lysander into a field profuse with pink heather, the faceless men closing in, one of them crowing, “We’ve arrested Faye! We are delighted.”

I wake with the word No! caught in my mouth. In my dream, my cries were loud; in reality, I’m making no more sound than a star in the night.

I lie perfectly still and force myself to replay everything. Perhaps from one tiny detail—a signpost, a church—Mahout will be able to identify the landing field and we’ll never use it again. Perhaps if I remember what the Nazis were wearing, I’ll know the time of year. But I finish that horror movie drenched in sweat and with no idea where the field might be.

I call Mahout. “You’re sure there are no fields with pink heather? Masses of heather. Not just a bush or two?”

“You asked me never to use a field with pink heather. And I never will.” Mahout’s sincerity is unmistakable.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him.

“Don’t be,” he replies. “Our instincts are all we have left in war. I’d be more sorry if you didn’t trust your own.”

—

The day before I leave, Monique arrives at my apartment, and before I even have to ask, she says, “Achille is healthy and happy. Cat has him in hand.” Cat, my nurse from Lyon, will share the care of my son with Monique, swapping places every fortnight.

“Does he cry a lot?” I whisper.

She beams. “He just learned to smile.”

My son smiles. But not for me.

I disappear into the bathroom, brace my hands on the sink.

First smile, first laugh, first food, first word. First wave, first tooth, first hug, first step. Someone else will delight in all those firsts. The memories of those moments will live in rooms not my own. All I will possess is the ache…and the longing.

My breasts let down, my milk not quite gone. All that food I’m making but will never feed my son.

The cry that tries to escape is like a baby’s—unfettered, violent. I shove my knuckles against my mouth, double over until my breasts stop weeping, too.

Then I haul myself up. In the mirror, my eyes are two stark orbs of blue in the thin face of a woman swaying on an edge too narrow to balance on. Dreaming of disaster. Crying almost every day.

There are so many reasons to go to London—to request guns to arm the groups we’re readying to fight, to plan for the invasion that must soon be coming. But now I see what Léon has perhaps already seen; I need to go for my own sanity. I need one month where I don’t have to run and hide, study every face, every shadow, every step.

If I’m to see the end of this fight, I need to take a moment to heal.

—

“Why are there so many people here?” I ask Léon when I arrive at HQ.

“They’ve come to honor you,” he says. “To say goodbye.”

He points to the adjoining room, where Marguerite is holding up a blue silk dress of the kind I used to wear before I understood that gowns and parties were the province of people who took being alive for granted.

“To represent France to the British,” Marguerite scolds me, “you need to be the Marie-Madeleine who once raced cars across deserts. Wear this one tonight, and I’ve laid out three more to be packed.”

“Remember when I used to write about couture?” I say. “Maybe our lives were silly and meaningless before. But there’s something to be said for making people pause and look at beautiful things for just a minute or two, isn’t there?”

So I let her style my hair and make up my face. I put on the dress and twirl for Léon with a mischievous smile. The bodice emphasizes the inward curve of my waist, and the skirt is cut seductively to mid-thigh on one side. On the other, it tumbles in an orgy of silk to the floor, and I feel like the most beautiful woman in the world, because that’s how potent Léon’s smileis.

He holds out his hand. “You’ve surpassed gorgeous and claimed a brand-new word— magnisquise .”

“Magnisquise?”

“Half magnifique, half exquise, and wholly and completely magnisquise .”

I reach up onto my toes and brush my lips against his. “I love you.”

“Me too, Marie-Madeleine Magnisquise,” he says with a smile that wraps so entirely around my heart it’s hard to breathe.

The bar we use as a letterbox is closed to the public for our party, and we eat food that the proprietor must have sold half his soul to commandeer. We drink wines that have been in the cellar for years. We talk about what we love.

“Bouillabaisse!” Rivière declares. “On a Marseille terrace with my wife beside me and the sun making the city glow like fire. And never mixing the broth with the fish.” He smiles at me, recalling that long-ago first meeting when he shouted, Good God, it’s a woman!

“My mother’s chicken pie,” Lucien says. “In the kitchen of the pension in Pau on a winter’s night with the fire blazing and the pie almost too hot to eat. But it smells too good, so you can’t wait, and it burns your tongue and warms you up—not just your stomach, but your life.”

Beneath the table, Léon reaches for my hand and I hold on in lieu of weeping.

Across the table, Monique and Magpie are holding hands too, as if Vallet, while never forgotten, will hurt her heart a little less as she makes room for another. Only Magpie could ever be good enough.

I want this night to last forever.

We wait until almost curfew before we leave and Léon murmurs in my ear, “We still have a half hour. Let’s walk.”

I haven’t strolled along a street for years, let alone a street in Paris. As a woman wanted by the Gestapo, I shouldn’t stroll now. But I’m leaving tomorrow, and that makes me rash because fate wouldn’t be so cruel as to let me be captured when I’m only hours from safety. So I slip my arm around Léon’s waist and we walk along the Champs-élysées, the constellations above us bright and numerous in the blackout. The streets are untroubled by traffic, the leaves of the horse chestnuts a brilliant chartreuse, and I can smell the last summer flowers—precious gifts that endure despite the very worst of times.

And memory turns a kaleidoscope that re-forms ma patrie et ma vie with each click. There I am in a Vichy square, staring at my first-ever Nazi. There I am on the porch of the Pension Welcome in Pau, the scent of Josette’s trout tickling my nostrils. Walking along the Corniche in Marseille, the spires of boats beckoning the faithful down to the water and the Notre Dame de la Garde standing like a lighthouse of hope above it all. The Dordogne, place of elves and magic and airplanes guided in by the silent moon where, in a bed in a chateau, I told Léon about our son. Lyon, where the Sa?ne and the Rhone were two rivers of silk circling the city in brilliant blue as I gave birth to that son. Paris, where my cheeks are pink-tinged from the Bordeaux, the taste of tarte Tatin lingers on my tongue, and the reminiscences of heroes have filled my night.

Then Léon picks up my left hand and slides something onto my ring finger. I look down and see that it’s no grand jewel, just a simple band of gold with letters inscribed over its surface. I trace over the words, see they’re written in my code. Unreadable to anyone except us.

Marie-Madeleine Faye and Léon Faye .

I look up into the face I’ve kissed and loved, the face that still makes me shiver whenever I see it, and I know—it will make me shiver until the end of time. Not until the end of our time, but beyond that. For as long as I have thoughts, Léon Faye will make me shiver.

“I don’t have any legitimate powers,” Léon says, voice fierce, “but I have the power of honor and right and resolve and they are no small things. So by those powers, I now declare us man and wife.”

“I definitely prefer,” I say, voice wobbling a little, “being Marie-Madeleine Faye to being a hedgehog.”

Léon’s smile is the same mix of devil-may-care and charm he first turned on me in Vichy in 1940. “And I prefer being Marie-Madeleine Faye’s husband to being Eagle.”

“I love thinking of you as an eagle. Soaring above all of this. Safe.”

“Safe,” he repeats. “God, that’s all I want. Do you think…” He hesitates, blinks, tries again, “Will I ever…”

Now my heart is cracking open. I know what he’s asking: Will I ever meet my son?

“Yes,” I say, ferocious now, too. “You’ll hold him. You’ll love him. You have to, because…”

I falter, don’t know how to explain that even the love we have for each other does not reach the limits of love. There is another kind entirely—the love of a parent for a child, which is the largest thing in the world, and it’s the only gift I want to give him.

“You will,” I repeat, and standing there on that Paris night, I believe in that promise like I believe that we are such a stronghold of hope nothing can ever tear us down. Not the swastika flags cracking like whips around us or the scowl Paris wears under the rule of a despot. My promise will stand because promises made by hearts in blacked-out cities on wedding nights are like the aqueducts and amphitheaters that remain in France from Roman times: monuments that have outlasted civilizations and flags and despots. They may be damaged and broken, but they are never destroyed.

—

At 4:55 the following afternoon, I walk, hat brim pulled low, suitcase in hand, to the corner of Rue Francois 1er. I climb into the vélo taxi beside Dayné and we pedal away.

As we turn onto the Champs-élysées, I see an old hunchback smoking a cigarette and pacing back and forth. And I thank God for the vélo taxi, which ambles rather than speeds, and in those precious, ambling seconds, the hunchback turns to face me, and his damp, glittering eyes betray the fact that the smile on his face is riven with tears.

But seconds do not last forever and soon the man is gone and all I have left is the memory and the pain.

Always the pain.