Page 42 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

41

The Last Road Remaining

84 Avenue Foch, Paris, October 1943

NOTES IN LAVATORY

Close to securing safer route out. Will make sure you’re included. Léon.

Chiseling not going well, so hope your plan is successful. Inayat.

Departure set for 22:30 hours, Thursday night. Be ready. Léon.

I’ve been ready for months. Inayat.

It’s Thursday. Müller will never again break one of Léon’s ribs, because Léon will never see Müller again, except to hand him to the Allies whenever they finally land in France.

The morning passes in the usual way. Gruel. Push-ups. Grinding stone away from the bars of the ventilation shaft in case something goes wrong tonight, which it won’t. The lavatory. Finding Inayat’s note.

Thank you, it says. I know you could have gone alone.

Only after much persuasion had Kieffer relented to another prisoner’s coming. Léon chose the woman; he’d want someone to choose Marie-Madeleine over him. And taking no one with him would make him like Müller, breaking a hope instead of a rib.

Hopes are harder to heal than ribs.

They’re also impossible to subdue. His are surging like adrenaline, making it hard to play the role of prisoner. Luckily he’s always been such an insubordinate asshole that the Nazis shouldn’t notice much difference.

He lowers himself to the floor after push-up one hundred, waiting for the door to open. But it doesn’t.

Kieffer should be arriving for the daily interrogation, which has lately turned to planning. Léon and Inayat are to feign illness. Kieffer’s physician will say they must be taken to hospital by ambulance, with Kieffer as guard. The ambulance will drive them to what Léon hopes is still an Alliance safe house, from where he’ll begin the task of tracking down whoever is left so Kieffer can be taken out by a Lysander, not to freedom as promised, but into the hands of the Allies. And Léon can reunite with Minerva.

What a reunion that will be.

His smile is wide now. But one thought makes it dim: Kieffer is never late.

Fear tries to course through him.

Then he hears it. Footsteps. Kieffer’s coming.

Time to double over, to pretend his appendix is about to burst out of his body, like the joy at finally getting out of here alive.

—

But it isn’t Kieffer who enters.

It’s a Gestapo officer Léon has never met. By way of greeting, he strikes Léon across the head with his stick.

Goddamn it . At least Léon won’t have to act as if he’s in pain when Kieffer appears.

For an hour Léon remains silent while each unanswered question about Alliance and Marie-Madeleine is met with a blow. Then he asks, trying to smile through lips swollen to twice their usual size, “To what do I owe the pleasure of this treatment?”

The next blow is the most shocking of all—and it isn’t even physical. “Resistance scum shot Sturmbannführer Kieffer last night,” the officer snarls.

The club flies harder and faster and Léon doesn’t even try to dodge the blows. This is the moment when you give up at last. When you know you’re done, and this is the place where you’ll die.

How many times can one man escape prison after all?

You’ve lost all of your lives and then some, Marie-Madeleine had said to him that night in London when she told him MI6 didn’t want him returning to France.

He should have listened to her.

And the thought slips in past the ringing in his ears: Was he too arrogant? Is his patriotism just selfishness dressed up in fine clothes? Who chooses a cell, a thrashing, and likely death over their infant son?

Will his son think his father died for hubris or for glory?

But his son shouldn’t have to think of his father. He should know his father.

Which means listening to the distant echo of Marie-Madeleine’s voice telling him that yes, Léon Faye is the one man who can escape from prison four times.

So he waits, curled up in a ball, for the officer’s fury to dim. Then he hauls himself to his feet, vomits into the bucket, takes out his bedsheet, tears it to pieces, and wraps the worst wounds, ignoring the violent whirl in his head. He removes the screwdriver from its hiding place, scoops out the breadcrumbs packed in to conceal the widening hole, and chisels away at that passage to freedom through the ventilation shaft—the last road remaining between him and the end.