Page 51 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

50

The Story of the Eagle

France, September 1944–January 1945

My mother stays with the children during the day and Monique returns to HQ as my courier. I know my family is deeply curious about Achille, but I can’t speak of Léon, not yet. Not until I know more. Meanwhile, Crane checks every prison and barracks in France and tells me what I already know—that Léon must be in Germany.

“Then we need the Nazis out of Germany yesterday,” I tell him. “I’m going back to Verdun.”

“Isn’t it time to stop?” he says, but he’s smiling as if he knows I won’t change my mind. “I’ll come with you,” he adds. “If I know how a parachute drop works, I can persuade MI6 to send more. That’s how we get rid of the Nazis.”

I leave the duke and Ladybug to manage HQ and we go to Verdun. I’m in the field when the plane flies over, and I help my agents unpack. Crane is very quiet throughout, and so am I—my mind on another parachute drop, the one going to Lucien that night to help him press farther forward into enemy territory than anyone has yet gone.

In the midst of that, Dragon comes to find me, back from a day’s scouting through the Moselle.

“They’re not moving,” he says.

“Who isn’t?” I ask distractedly, wiping the packing resin off a gun.

Crane clears his throat. “Let’s talk,” he says, and at the look on his face, I say, “Perhaps I should put the gun down. Sounds like you’re about to tell me something that might make me want to shoot you.”

Nobody laughs.

We move closer to the pine trees, which point upward like bayonets ready to break open the sky. Once they would have reminded me of Christmas. But my analogies are contorted by war.

“We’ve only got one port available to bring supplies in,” Crane says, staring up at the tallest pine. “The farther we move away from that port, the harder it is to get the supplies out to the troops. We’ve run out of fuel. The advance has stopped.”

“But you’re only forty kilometers from the German border!” I cry. “If you stop, the Nazis will regroup.”

“I know.”

I curse wildly. Maybe I can cross into Germany. But where would I go? I have no idea where Léon is, or any of my missing agents.

Crane shakes his head as violently as I just swore. “You can best help Léon Faye stay alive by keeping Alliance going until the war ends. Not by waltzing off into Germany and getting killed. We still need information.”

“You want to know where the Germans are and how many troops they have at each location?” I say, words heavy as stone.

So I send out two agents: one to scout the border region to the north, the other to the south.

Only one returns.

Crane’s frown deepens to a crevasse as the hours tick past. In the end I say, my voice like a blade because otherwise it would be a bottomless ocean of tears, “You wanted to see us at work in the field. This is what it’s like. I send out agents. Only some of them come back.”

As if to compound the lesson, a courier arrives from HQ with a message from London. It tells us that the plane circled above Lucien’s landing field last night. But all the pilot saw was a village in flames.

Lucien’s transmitter has gone silent.

I know what it means. Not just another hero lost. But a dear, darling boy.

I push away from Crane, stumble into the forest. The sky is the color of soot, the earth is slush, the trees are ash. All that’s left are cinders; the world is scorched of color, of joy, of hope.

Do I still believe in the mission I’ve clung to for more than four long years? In twenty, fifty, eighty years’ time, will anyone remember the men and women of Alliance who gave their whole selves to this war? Or will their graves be forgotten, visited only by weeds, because our murders are too countless to be remembered?

All I know is that being an alliance of optimistic adventurers was not enough—we must become martyrs, too.

—

Through December, a desperate kind of fury propels me as I think about what this delay will cost. How many more imprisoned men and women will die because we’ve stopped our advance and given the Germans time to kill them?

What must Léon think? That we’ve abandoned him. That the country he gave everything to isn’t fighting hard enough to bring him home.

I go to Luxembourg with my agents, where we discover there isn’t a single piece of artillery east of the Moselle. We tell the Allies, but it’s not enough. They want more evidence, and we’re the mules going out to get it, because we have more than skin in this game—we have the bodies and souls of our friends.

I go to the German frontier, ignoring Crane’s order to stay in Paris.

“You’ll have to throw me in jail first,” I tell him.

I’m standing on the banks of the Moselle in the freezing dark of night, chilblains back with a vengeance and marking time in painful seconds along with my hip, when four agents pile into a dinghy with a radio and cross the frontier under fire. I’m there when that radio crackles to life, and I know they’ve made it. I’ve landed agents in Germany.

Over the next two days, fifty-four critical messages pour in with all the information Patton needs about the strength of German troops near Thionville. I dispatch Dragon posthaste, along with an urgent appeal for action.

Finally, near Christmas, Patton uses that information and makes an advance. But it still isn’t the end. The Germans fight on.

One afternoon when I return to Paris, bone weary from yet another expedition to the German border, desperate for cold cream for my hands and a chair to sit in, I find someone sitting by Monique’s side, his hand held in hers—someone who makes my hopes soar. Magpie!

I fling myself on him. He’s thinner than it’s possible for a human to be. His wrists are scarred and scabbed from the manacles he wore for fifteen months.

Fifteen months in chains. Nobody would do that to an animal.

He tells me that the British managed to exchange him for a German prisoner the Nazis wanted set free. And then he says, “I saw Léon.”

My heart stills.

“Just after the New Year. He’s alive. We were transferred to Sonnenberg together and put in dungeons side by side. If we’re to save him, we need to act now.”

It’s what I’ve been hoping to hear since Léon was arrested back in September 1943.

Now to work out a plan to free him.

—

As if the Fates have rewound the thread of pain and loss they’ve been unspooling for me since 1940, two more miracles happen. Magpie finds Lanky, the traitor, parading through Paris in an FFI captain’s uniform as if he’s on the Allies’ side. Luckily the street is busy with true freedom fighters, and just a few shouted words puts Lanky at the bottom of a pile of men. He’s locked up in prison, awaiting trial. I don’t go to see him. Not yet. Not until I can take Léon with me and show Lanky that we are more powerful than evil.

The second miracle is that my radio operator rushes into my office hollering, “It’s just been announced on German radio! The Nazis want to exchange Commandant Faye for a prisoner the Allies are holding.”

Magpie and I erupt into laughter, weeping—hysteria.

The Allies will certainly make an exchange for a man like Léon—Dansey told me he’d do anything he could.

It’s time for him to keep his promise.

That night, I gather my children around me by the fire and I tell them the story of the Eagle, Léon Faye.