Page 40 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

39

If You Get in My Way, I’ll Watch You Burn

London, November 1943–May 1944

Weeks pass in a stasis of nothing except the constant question in my heart: Where are you, Léon? I dream of Kauffmann in his ancient cape, shouting as if he didn’t understand that clandestine work was secret. I see Rivière eating bouillabaisse, Bee burying tables beneath food to nourish us. They aren’t the ones talking to the Gestapo. They will never tell.

But someone is. For so many agents and so many sectors to fall at once, someone is betraying us.

I ask Dansey for a plane to take me back to France. He refuses, says the weather is too bad to even send supplies to the remaining agents. But I understand subtext—he thinks Alliance is dead.

Dansey is killing me, too.

Furious messages come through from my remaining agents. We need money and transmitters and new codes, they urge me.

Maurice, who’s trapped in London too, stares soberly at me. We’ve asked and we’ve begged, but Marie-Madeleine and the once-brash flying ace have no idea what to do.

“Perhaps I should shut it all down,” I say to him one night in my cottage, which I hate for its vast windows, chintzy sofas, and state of order. I want my cheeky radio operators, tiny balls of paper, secret rooms with drawn curtains…an address nobody knows.

“You can’t,” the duke says, but even his head is bowed.

I stride over to the windows, throw the drapes across the glass. When I withdraw my hand, I can see there’s blood around my fingertips and that I’ve stained the curtains with the blistering mess of chilblains that have marred my hands every winter of the war. They ache, God they ache, but I ignore the pain and instead tell Maurice a hard and painful truth. “Alliance is like the gray wolf, hunted to extinction—only the taxidermized carcasses of you and me remaining.”

“You don’t believe that,” Maurice says.

My laugh is wild. “Believe? All I did was believe. I believed in too much when instead I should have been a tyrant like Dansey. I should have ordered Léon to stay. What Alliance needs at its head is a stone.”

And I write a message with my stony hand: If I do not succeed in normalizing the situation I will give everyone their freedom of action on January 1 .

“Unless a Christmas miracle happens this week,” I tell Maurice in a voice like Navarre’s once was, made of flint and steel, “I’m sending this message. Then Alliance’s remaining men and women will no longer be beholden to a slaughtered network whose leader is trapped in London—a leader who’s been fighting for so long, she has nothing left to give.”

—

The duke of Magenta gives me two days. On Christmas Eve, the night when we should be celebrating, he pounces.

Last year, he called me the queen of the animals. This year, he passes me a glass of cognac and says, “Queens can’t give up. They can’t resign or stand down. They can only be overthrown. Nobody else has stepped in to lead Alliance. So you’re still our queen.”

I hold up a hand to silence him.

But he won’t be quiet. “Everyone in Alliance will choose you, every time. You have me in the north—I know you’ll find a way to get me back to France—and Lucien in the south. Dragon is still out there mapping the northern coastline, the thing you told us was our top priority. We can rebuild from that. We can deliver that map. And you also told me you think there’s a traitor. It’s your job, Queen Hérisson, to find out who that is and slit his throat. I once told you that, one day, you’d be winning at something more important than a rally. But here you are, thinking of walking away before the final victory.”

“We aren’t winning,” I say in my new voice of granite.

Maurice just picks up his jacket and tells me he’s going to a party.

I rush after him, but by the time I get to the door, I can’t see him anymore. Fog has landed like incendiary smoke, rendering London invisible.

I step out into it.

It’s the kind of fog that makes people ride their bicycles into lampposts. It reduces all the larger sounds and magnifies the small ones. I can hear a cloud move, a spider’s footsteps, a web spinning.

Perhaps I’m dead, and this is hell.

The loudest sound of all makes me stop. If you are dead, Minerva, would you be proud?

Léon’s voice.

My whole body turns. Where is he? If I can hear him, he must be alive.

And if he’s alive, then how can I stop before the prisons are emptied and my agents freed?

—

When I arrive at MI6, I look so completely unlike the wreck I’ve been over the past weeks that Dansey does a double take. I look like the beautiful spy, which I know is what they call me. Black gloves hide my hands and my lipstick is red, too-fast jet-engine red, emergency-light red, no-man’s-land red, the red of brandy drunk straight from the bottle. It’s the kind of red that says I’m no longer the ash, and if you get in my way, I’ll watch you burn.

I don’t let him speak. “I won’t accept Tom as my MI6 liaison anymore.”

“My dear—”

I want to shove his my dear s down his throat. But I keep my temper in check because I will leave here winning today, rather than losing. “Tom is to go,” I repeat. “You owe me this. For Bla.”

I look not just into his eyes, but into his soul, and I use my own eyes to say that I no longer believe I can win if I lead like a woman. I no longer believe I can win if I lead like a man. To fight against animals, you have to become one. And that is what I am.

Dansey nods.

The next day, Crane is back by my side, as is the duke. We rebuild Noah’s Ark once more. As the duke said, Lucien’s southern region is operating as if nothing has happened. Stosskopf, our inside man in the submarine base, remains free. As is Dragon, who’s mapping the coastal defenses. Mandrill, who’s in charge of operations in the vital Bordeaux sector, hasn’t been captured, either. Messages are trickling in. I gather them into one comprehensive intelligence report, reapply my armor, stride back into Dansey’s office, and place a folder of transmissions on his desk.

Toulon bombing a success stop 1,500 Germans killed.

14 submarines currently in Saint-Nazaire stop consider bombing.

Have microphotos of bunkers housing long-range missiles pointed at London.

“Do you want to blow up these submarines, keep killing fifteen hundred Germans, get hold of those photos of the bombs pointing straight at you?” I ask Dansey. “Or would you like those submarines to blow up your invasion plans instead?”

I thrust out one more message, from Dragon. Map nearly finished. Need Lysander to deliver it to you.

Dansey almost smiles. “I’ll have the team draw up new questionnaires for your agents. One step at a time.”

Alliance rises up again.

Crane, who was once a navy officer, helps me navigate the ban on Lysanders by finding a launch that can creep in close to the French coastline. The duke returns to France with money, questionnaires, transmitters, and instructions. Once Dansey hears that we now have nine transmitters operating in the north again, he agrees to our first Lysander landing since the arrests six months ago.

The quantity of information that comes back on the airplane is astounding. But there’s also a letter from the duke telling me of Coustenoble’s death.

My dear Couscous was being ferried by ambulance to hospital to escape the Gestapo. He died of tuberculosis seconds before the Nazis surrounded the ambulance, fulfilling the vow he’d once made: The Boches shall never get me alive.

The letter also says he received his medal and his robe. They were his greatest joys.

Once upon a time, a man named Navarre invited me on a crusade. I recruited a first wave of agents, among them Schaerrer, who got me to Spain; Vallet, whose clothes were too big; and Coustenoble, who called me little one .

All dead now.

And Josette has been arrested, too.

Three months ago, Couscous’s death would have felled me. But I need to be able to tell the world that he died for freedom. And I have to tell Lucien the news of his mother in person. Because he’s my son now.

So I prepare to meet Dansey, to demand another airplane.But Crane appears, saying, “Someone came in on the Lysander.”

Dragon steps forward, a fierce Norman who looks as if he was descended from Vikings. “For you, Madame,” he says proudly.

Out of his suitcase bursts a fifty-five-foot-long map of the Cotentin Peninsula, the entire northwest coast of France. On it are marked, in minute, perfect, beautiful detail, every anti-tank trench and access path, every coastal battery and gun emplacement, every piece of artillery and barbed wire, every minefield and observation tower.

“My God,” Crane says as he stares in utter astonishment. “It’s the most complete and detailed picture of the landing sites for—”

He cuts himself off.

But I know what he was about to say: of the landing sites for the Allied invasion.

Which means it’s coming. And with this map in hand, the Allies will win. No one else will die.

Alliance has stumbled, but it has never fallen.

It is indispensable.

—

With every win, there are losses. Stosskopf is arrested. So are the twenty people who worked with Dragon gathering the information for his map. As soon as he returns to France, Dragon is arrested, too.

From Paris, Maurice transmits messages telling me of the capture of new agents I’ve barely had time to give code names to and have never even met.

On the credenza at my cottage I keep a row of candles. I light one for every agent taken. The credenza looks as if it’s made of wax now, not wood.

I let each blow land on the tough skin of my hide and I keep going until…

A Frenchman who works in London at the archives of DeGaulle’s Free French intelligence organization, the same organization that rejected Navarre’s help when he offered it back in 1940, brings me a piece of paper.

“This was sent to the Free French by one of our agents back in October and flagged to be filed,” he says. “But I knew you’d want to see it.”

The transmission says: Eagle was arrested along with Mahout and a British radio operator after landing in France. One of the landing crew, a Jean-Paul, was also arrested but is a Gestapo informer and was released by the Boches.

There is only one Jean-Paul in my network. Lanky. He was at the field when Léon landed in France. He was responsible for Elephant’s arrest. After that, I remember I’d said, He’s either a fool or a traitor.

I’d spoken in anger about what I thought was incompetence. But this note tells me it was evil.

“Why didn’t they send it to me in October?” My voice is a whisper. I’ve been desperate for evidence of who the traitor is, and our so-called French allies have been holding that evidence in their hands for months. Every arrest since October has been because of Lanky leading the Nazis straight to us, again and again and again.

The man in front of me looks pained. It’s not his fault, and he’s risking De Gaulle’s wrath by even being here, let alone showing me this transmission. It’s an open secret that the Free French hate the fact that we send our information to the British, rather than to them. But Navarre offered himself to De Gaulle and was rejected. The British accepted us. Is withholding this evidence an act of revenge by our supposed allies? Or was the import of the note just not understood?

I’ll never know.

But I know that I have to get back to France.

I give Dansey one last chance. “I need to go now,” I tell him.

“You won’t last six days,” he tells me in that smooth, patronizing voice.

So I do something I would never have considered a year ago. But there are no limits now to what I will do to achieve my goals: Resurrect Alliance. Throw Lanky in jail. Free Léon and all the rest. I don’t even care if Navarre, who’s been moved from a French prison to a German concentration camp, kills me when he finds out.

I go to see De Gaulle’s chief intelligence officer and make a deal with the devil who kept the note about Lanky from me.

“Alliance will become part of the Free French,” I tell him, offering no pleasantries or small talk, no smiles or obfuscations. “I’ll remain in control of my network, but you’ll get my information. De Gaulle wants to be the one in charge when France is finally free, and you know that having Alliance’s support gives him power. In exchange, you’ll use one of the airplanes you’re in control of to get me back to France. But I’ll also keep sending our information to MI6 and will keep supporting them, too. I won’t be budged on that.”

A shocked laugh escapes him. “You’re very forward,” he says.

I pass him a legal document that outlines the terms by which Alliance will become part of the Free French and fix my eyes on him. “Politicians keep secrets. I’m a commandant. We keep moving forward until we win.”

He accepts the papers. He knows De Gaulle is far stronger with Alliance than without it.

My final stop that day is to visit Dansey, to tell him what I’ve done. He sets his pipe down and says, “You’ve turned into quite the wildcat.”

“I was trained by the best.”

—

Crane gets me new identity papers. I become Germaine Pezet, French peasant, the last identity I hope to possess before I can reclaim my true name. An officer who’s an expert in disguise transforms me, using a net to lower my hairline, a dental prosthetic to give me bucked, yellow teeth. My hair is dyed black, spectacles are added, and I look so hideous that Crane bursts out laughing when he sees me.

“Nobody would mistake you for the beautiful spy,” he says.

I laugh, then say, “Thank you. For everything.”

And he replies, “Thank you for so much more than everything.”

I don’t weep. A drought now lives where I once possessed tears. But I smile. Because, at last, I am proud.

I’m coming, Léon. Hold on just a little bit longer.

—

On the morning I’m due to leave, I run over everything in my mind. Of our once three-thousand-strong network, there are still left seventy-five principal agents along with eight hundred foot soldiers and their helpers. Seventeen transmitters.

We need only hold on through the invasion and into the history that must surely follow.

Into a false-bottomed valise go crystals for the radio sets, new codes, money, and the cyanide capsules that announce my two stark choices if I’m caught: Betray my network or kill myself.

There is, of course, a third option: Don’t get caught.

I dress in a gray wool suit, a felt hat, and a navy-blue coat. I put in my prosthetic.

A knock sounds on the door. I open it, expecting Crane. But it’s Dansey. His expression is dour, and for a moment I think he’s going to stop me, and I wonder if I could ever use a gun on this man.

“We’re sending you into the wolf’s mouth,” he says starkly. “So near the end. It’s madness.”

I say what I always have. “I must go back.”

Outside, anti-aircraft fire sounds. Then comes the distant whiz of a V1 rocket, which have been falling on Britain for weeks. The rockets my network told the British about. The rockets that have wreaked havoc, yes, but not utter destruction because so many of the launchers and facilities were blown up due to Alliance’s intelligence.

Dansey picks up my hand. “I’m ashamed of seeing you all these years doing things I couldn’t do myself.”

And in his soul I see something I hadn’t understood. It’s not that he hates that I’m a woman. He hates that sometimes when he looks at me, he feels as if his own role has been nothing and mine, everything.

And it is.

Then he’s gone, and in my hand remains a rabbit’s foot, a blessing from someone I never thought would care.

It’s time to go home to my family.