Page 31 of The Mademoiselle Alliance
30
A Cunning Little Shit
London, August 1943
Léon transmits messages to me daily, each with plans more daring and elaborate to prepare an army of Frenchmen to support the Allied invasion. Crane and I pore over them, considering which are most feasible and least dangerous—until Crane disappears. He’s replaced by Tom, who’s so British his upper lip doesn’t move when he speaks. His body and personality resemble a stiff little plank.
“Dansey and I don’t agree with that,” he says almost every time I put a proposal in front of him.
I remind myself to use my head—to not wear my emotions like a bright red dress. “I think you should listen to the people who are actually in France.”
“And I think,” he says very coolly, “you should remember your place.”
It’s all I can do not to throw a paperweight at him. I’m wearing trousers, have a revolver and a packet of cigarettes in my purse rather than a compact, but I still have breasts and longish hair and dainty features, and that’s enough to make me inferior.
I press my hands onto his desk and say in a voice so crisp you could snap it, “I remember my place every night when I’m lying in my comfortable bed here in London. I remember my place because normally my place is a burrow, a cave I might spend a day in—or a week if I’m lucky—before the Gestapo find it and I’m once again placeless, relying on friends who value freedom more than their lives to give me a different burrow for another day or week. My place is the air, the void, the very edges of existence. And from that place, I manage three thousand agents, the only network that covers the whole of France. So I think the only person here who needs to remember his place is you.”
His face mottles purple like a turnip.
I stalk out onto the street, then slow, still unused to being able to walk freely. The sky here in England has never made acquaintance with a van Gogh paint box. Its palette is like those mordant Whistler oils, and in the gloom, the questions pile up. How can Dansey say he’s indebted to Alliance but then send Crane away? What’s the best way to manage these men and still get what France desperately needs: a successful Allied invasion as soon as possible?
The British need Alliance. But I need the British, too.
I cross to St. James’s Park, bypass the air-raid shelters and the flowerbeds given over to vegetables, and sit on an empty bench. The vista is of rubble and rain. Even the people are gray. No tricolor feathers adorn their hats. I wish for a moment that I hadn’t recolored my hair to its natural blond—a redhead here would be like a shocking pink flamingo against a backdrop of snow, and wouldn’t it be nice to be that visible, just for once, rather than always trying to be the night, the shadow; the eclipse, but never the sun.
Someone takes the seat beside me and I stiffen. I don’t turn—you never turn to see who’s taken the next seat unless you want to be arrested.
But Crane’s very welcome voice says, “I’ve debated whether or not I should tell you this. When Dansey found out that the person who ran our most successful network was a woman, he was…” Crane chooses the next word carefully. “Horrified.”
So my gut’s initial assessment—that Dansey was a discontented pig—was right.
“He’s a cunning little shit,” Crane goes on, “but—and I mean this in a positive way—so are you. You’ve survived longer than any other Resistance leader. Your cunning is a force to be reckoned with; his is a meanness. But recognize in him those qualities that you also have, and you can win. Also, Tom isn’t showing you half the messages that are coming in from Alliance. He’s only showing you the ones he knows you’re expecting.”
I’m so stunned I can’t speak. These people are my allies? Why are they hiding things from me? Then I remember something Navarre once told me: All men want is power and glory . These men see Alliance as the path to their glory; they want something they can beat their chests about for years to come.
They can have the glory—I have no intention of beating my breast. But they can’t have Alliance. My network isn’t a tool. It’s a fifteen-year-old boy who’s now a man who risks everything and yet still isn’t sure he matters.
Then Crane whispers, “Dansey’s the one who sent in Bla. He makes mistakes and he doesn’t admit to them.”
Crane walks away, and I’m left with bile and rage.
Dansey is the one who got Vallet killed.
I make myself not storm into his office. I make myself sit. I have the lives of people I love in my hands, and I need to sift through the politics to protect those lives.
That’s when I realize—Crane said Dansey was horrified when he found out I was a woman. Every time I’ve mentioned going back to France, he’s stalled. He controls the planes. He has the power to keep me here.
But like so many others, he sees the woman rather than the hedgehog who lives beneath my skin. My quills are sharp—and they sting.
I’ve outwitted the Nazis for three years. I can outwit a discontented pig, too.
—
Gibbet has Ant and Caviar. Restaurant down.
The message comes in Léon’s daily dispatch. Gibbet is the Gestapo. Caviar is an agent from our Paris HQ and Ant is Dayné, my trusted bodyguard. Restaurant is our Grenoble sector.
It’s happening again. How? A small mistake? A deliberate error? A traitor?
The next transmission is worse: Firefly and Saluki on run from Gibbet.
No. Not the duke of Magenta and Marguerite.
Another message tells me that Léon’s notebook, which was found on Elephant when he was arrested, has been partially decoded by the Gestapo. That’s what yielded up Ant’s and Caviar’s names. As for Maurice and Marguerite, they were already wanted by the Nazis, so it could be coincidence. But the timing is troubling.
I make frantic arrangements to get Marguerite and her children to the Amitié Chrétienne, where I pull in one final favor to get them over the border to Switzerland. Then I order Maurice to escape to London on the next Lysander. His reply is exactly what I thought it would be: He’ll come at the September moon, once Marguerite and the children are safe.
I go to see Dansey. If the Gestapo have Léon’s code book, I need to make some changes.
“Eagle needs to come back with Magpie at the August moon,” I tell him. “I have to decentralize the network completely. Make each sector independent, like Lucien’s. They’ll get money, questionnaires, and intelligence priorities from me, but they’ll recruit their own agents. Then there’ll never be another code book full of every agent’s name, and we won’t have to rebuild from scratch every time one person is arrested.”
Even Dansey sees the sense in my request. As for me, I’ll see Léon very soon, and while that’s exhilarating enough, I’m hoping that this time, we’ll make Alliance strong enough to see us into the promised, but still undated, Allied invasion of France.
August arrives and I watch the moon grow bigger every night—crescent, quarter, gibbous—until it’s as big and round as Coustenoble’s eyes the first time I met him. Lucien is going back to France with all my gifts, questionnaires for the network, and one very special item: Alliance’s first military medal, awarded to Coustenoble. I picture him sitting in bed in his robe, medal pinned to it, Josette beaming at his side, and my smile is a demilune, too.
“Kiss Josette’s cheeks for me,” I tell Lucien at the Bertrams’ cottage before he departs for the airfield. “And stay alive so you can wear your robe for your English friend.”
He grins. “Maybe I already have.”
I laugh, hoping it’s a sign—that such a joyous parting will end in happiness, not loss.
I’m scared of a pink heather nightmare, so I don’t sleep that night as Lucien and Léon swap places on a landing field in France. I wait up with Barbara Bertram, who talks easily and quietly, a steady stream of nothing in particular that’s soothing all the same, until the telephone shrills and I jump, spilling tea into my saucer.
She listens to the phone, then smiles. “Time to put the kettle on for tea.”
I hug Barbara so hard I’m surprised she doesn’t protest. Then I watch the door, willing it to open.
Finally, it does.
Léon and Magpie have both flown to London before, so they know Barbara. Minutes pass while they kiss her cheeks and press gifts upon her. She laughs and accepts their affectionate greetings. Then it’s my turn.
I embrace Magpie and try to give Léon, in front of an audience, only the same companionable greeting. But his hand slips briefly under my hair and strokes the back of my neck, and I turn my face in to his chest for the merest second, inhaling France and Gauloises and the laurel of Aleppo soap. Thank God Magpie is still entertaining Barbara with an out-of-tune version of “Home Sweet Home,” because I’m unable to stop a quiet gasp as everything inside me catches fire at the feel of this man.
Léon’s eyes fall to a gold chain I’m wearing around my neck, tucked into my dress. I bring my hand up to touch the place on my breastbone where my wedding ring lives.
He smiles, eyes blazing like my insides.
But I won’t be alone with him for hours yet.
The driver takes us to my office in London, where Léon says, “When Lucien stepped off the plane, he asked me if one notebook he was expecting had come in. When I said it had, he told me to give it to you first.”
Clipped to the front of the book is a note hastily scribbled by Lucien: I saw half of this material before we left for England. I know it looks preposterous, but I have total faith in Amniarix. She got the information directly from an officer who works at the site where these things are being built.
I know this notebook is going to tell me about the terrible new weapon Lucien warned me the Nazis were making. My hand moves very, very slowly to open the covers. Because—what if I read that this weapon is powerful enough to stop an Allied invasion?
The first page reads:
Kampfgruppe KG 100 is reported to be experimenting with bombs that could be guided by the bomb aimer from such a distance that the plane can remain out of anti-aircraft firing range. Accuracy is said to be perfect…
As if that wasn’t chilling enough—an aircraft armed with bombs that can be fired from so far away we won’t even know they’re coming—the next part is worse.
The final stage in the development of a stratospheric bomb is said to have been reached. This bomb is reported to be 10 cubic meters in volume and is launched vertically into the stratosphere before traveling a horizontal range of almost 500 kilometers. Trials are reported to have begun, with excellent results as regards accuracy. An expert estimated that just 50–100 of these bombs would suffice to destroy London.
A long-range stratospheric bomb, just fifty to one hundred of which could destroy the entire city I’m living in now—the city that holds all the plans and money and expertise we need to defeat the Nazis.
“This could change the face of warfare entirely.” Léon’s face is pale. “Unless the Allies can destroy it first.”
“Thank God for Lucien,” I breathe. “Now we might be able to do just that.”
“Thank God you trusted him enough to give him his head,” Léon says soberly. “I don’t know any other Resistance leader who’d let a young man start up an independent sector of their network.”
I shake my head. “I can’t take any credit for this.”
A touch of rose is starting to brighten the gray sunrise as I walk to MI6, where I tell Tom, “I’m not leaving until you pass this information on to someone who understands bombs and physics.”
“You don’t need to worry so much,” he says condescendingly, as if I’m concerned about seating plans for a party rather than the destruction of London.
“I think you ought to worry more.” I sit down at his desk, take out a Gitanes, light it, and close my eyes. “What a comfortable chair. I could sit here all day.”
“Bloody French women.” But he finds me a physicist who reads the reports and says just one word: “Extraordinary.” Then he looks across at me. “Who is the source?”
I tell him the truth. “The most remarkable girl of her generation.”
Of all the intelligence Alliance has gathered over the years, this is our crowning achievement. And I hope that one day soon I can meet Amniarix and tell her how remarkable she is.
—
It’s Crane who sends me a coded note to tell me that Amniarix’s report landed on Churchill’s desk the very next day and that plans are being drawn up to bomb the base where the weapons are being developed.
On August 17, nearly six hundred RAF bombers take to the sky. Léon and I imagine it in our bed together the following night, each airplane the beacon of a life the Gestapo took from my network. Schaerrer. Vallet. Madeleine Rivière. The women in Klaus Barbie’s prison in Lyon. Because of them, the network grew and survived, and now the Peenemünde base where the stratospheric bombs are being built has almost been destroyed.
Crane’s note reads, We still expect to see some bombs manufactured and launched, but the air raid will have delayed German production enough that it won’t wreak havoc with our invasion preparations. Thanks to Alliance .
“I wish I was at HQ with Monique and Lucien and Maurice,” I tell Léon. “I wish I was saying to them: Thanks to Alliance. ”
Léon rolls on top of me. “You’ll have to make do with celebrating with me.”
So I do.