Page 45 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

44

I Forget to Push the Bolt Across

Aix-en-Provence, May–July 1944

It takes eleven modes of transport, including a Hudson bomber, a wagon, and a coal truck, to cross France. My palms are brown, rubbed all over with the soil of my country, when I arrive at an apartment on Rue Granet in Aix-en-Provence, my rendezvous with Lucien.

Once inside my new lair, I let myself think about my family. Léon. Béatrice. Christian. Achille. I know the invasion is a day or at most a week behind me, that the Germans are hearing those rumors, too, and will step up every manhunt and trap, every torture and interrogation. So I need this final fight to be quick and over.

Alliance must get to work.

Half an hour later, Lucien scratches at the door.

“Hérisson!” he cries, and we embrace and weep and are ridiculously sentimental for at least five minutes until I step back, wipe my face, take out cigarettes for us, and say, “Update me.”

“I have boxes of documents for you,” he says. “Dragon managed to escape, and he’s with the duke in Paris.”

Just like that, it’s as if I never left.

He tells me that little has been discovered about the agents behind bars, except that all around France, trainloads of prisoners are being sent somewhere beyond the Rhine.

“Léon?” I ask, forgetting I’m supposed to say Eagle .

“Nothing.”

But nor have we heard that he’s dead. My gut would know if he was.

“You should have ordered him to stay in London.” Lucien’s words are sharp.

That blow is one that finally pierces my hide. I flinch. “I couldn’t.”

Lucien stands and, my God, he looks like a blazing, passionate Léon when he says, “That’s a lie. But I know why you have to tell it to yourself.”

I reach out my hand and take his, our fingers equally smeared with dirt. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant that I couldn’t make myself do it, not that it was impossible to make him stay.”

“Eagle would have ordered you if he’d been in your position.”

Very gently, I tell him, “No, he wouldn’t. In that situation, he would have been weak, too.”

“Dammit!” Lucien’s frustration echoes loudly and he walks over to the ceiling beam, raises both his hands, and presses them against it. His shoulders move up and down in time to his breath, and I press one foot painfully hard on top of the other to stop myself from holding him like his mother would. I let him pretend to be just breathing, when I’m certain he’s weeping for Josette and Léon and Amniarix, and every man and woman he’s sent out into the field who hasn’t returned, and maybe also the girl in London whom he’ll never show the hard scars he’s had to grow around his heart.

When he turns around, he says, “You can’t be weak again.”

“I know.”

Never in my life did I think that if Léon was in jail, I wouldn’t rush straight out to find him. But never in my life did I imagine that Lucien would one day become my chief lieutenant and I’d watch him try not to cry over the deaths he blames himself for.

In the animal kingdom, lionesses lead their prides, female elephants rule their herds, and the lady hyena takes charge of her pack. It’s with the elephant’s strength, the hyena’s determination, and the lioness’s fierceness that I tell Lucien, “Every decision I make now is for one end. Victory. Which is why I won’t send an agent to search every prison in France. It’s why I can’t send anyone to look for Lanky. Because we need everyone we have left to gather the intelligence that leads to victory. That’s how the prisons get opened and the traitors caught. I know I’m condemning people to die. But if I make any other decision, I’m condemning even more.”

“We’ll never be the same after this, will we?” Lucien says bleakly.

Last year I would have lied to him. Now I whisper, “No. And we’ll have to learn to live with a desert inside us instead of a soul.”

—

After Lucien has gone to the farmhouse, where he keeps the transmitter, I lie in the bath with my eyes closed. Perhaps I fall asleep; perhaps the dirt on my hands connects me to the smudged dirt on my love’s fingertips, but suddenly I can feel Léon in the bathtub, too. It isn’t him exactly, nor his ghost. It isn’t memory, either. It’s as if the water has taken on his shape and the air has carried in his voice. “Look at how beautiful we are,” he whispers.

And I know for certain—he’s alive. I need to help the Allies win before that changes.

—

Operation Overlord lands the Allies on the beaches we mapped for them. From there, they take control of entire towns. Across the south of France, music and celebrations play, and I wonder what France looks like that night from the air. A firework, perhaps.

The Nazis will lose. The only thing I can’t see is how long it will take. But, as Lucien toasts with the Beaujolais he found somewhere, “Soon. It will be soon.”

If you’ve been stranded on an island for ten years, a year might be soon. If you’ve been locked in a prison for one hundred years, perhaps ten might feel like soon.

Soon is too far away.

The Germans retaliate. Violence rules. American and British soldiers leave their bodies behind in Normandy. And London demands more intelligence than ever.

I restart sectors, find new agents to man those sectors, answer questionnaires, make my way through reports that come in from the new generation of Alliance. Lucien collects transmissions from me and his operator sends them. The days go on into July, which brings a heavy, blanketing humidity, perfuming the air with roses that still bloom despite it being the fifth year of German occupation.

There’s a scrape at the door and Lucien tells me, “The subprefect let me know that the Germans are planning to search Aix-en-Provence tomorrow afternoon. They know the maquis are expecting supplies.”

“I’ll pack up,” I tell him. “Come back for me at seven in the morning.”

As I close the door behind him, I forget to push the bolt across.

—

Five minutes later, it happens. German voices shouting in the stairwell. I race to the door, but there are too many of them.

“Where’s the man?” they shout as they break in.

I put on a show. Use my disguise to the best of my ability.

I almost make it.

Almost is a word as bad as soon . There’s no such thing as being almost free.

I’m taken to a prison cell in an army barracks.