Page 7 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

6

Like I’m Seventeen Again

Vichy, December 1940–February 1941

I bypass the high-ranking men at the H?tel des Sports and eavesdrop on those closer to my age, stopping when I find a group sharing war stories about falling from the sky. One of them, small and spry like the foxes that roamed the western Sahara, is recounting that, back in June, the air force sent him up in an Arsenal with almost no fuel because they’d run out. It stayed airborne for just ten minutes.

I wince. Arsenals are made of plywood. “That must have been like crash-landing in a cardboard box.”

He grins. “You sound like you know airplanes.”

Now everyone’s eyes are on me. A woman who knows airplanes is as common as a heroic Vichy politician.

“I used to fly a Caudron,” I tell them. “Until a friend borrowed it and mistook the Loire for a landing strip.”

They groan and ask how I learned to fly. I tell them that the duke of Magenta, a name known by all pilots, is a friend of mine. They’re fascinated to hear of our exploits in Morocco, of the time he took me up and, without warning, performed an avalanche, throwing the plane into a snap roll at the top of a loop.

Everyone gasps. Pulling off an avalanche in 1928 was, for anyone other than the duke, suicide. “I made him promise to teach me when I learned to fly.”

“And did he?” someone demands.

“Of course.”

The man who crash-landed the Arsenal offers me his seat at the head of the group with a sweeping bow. I settle in, ready to trade more aerobatic tales, when he says, “If you’ve lived outside France, then you must have a different perspective on what’s happening here now.”

The mood shifts. Eyes dart from him to me to the officers by the fire. Air is held in lungs, waiting.

Is he testing my loyalties? What are his?

But if I don’t take a risk, I’ll never know if any of these men could be Navarre’s intelligence gatherers. Without intelligence gatherers, we’ll have very little to give the British, who, the newspapers tell us, are being bombed to rubble by the Luftwaffe.

“My perspective is a bit like when you’re upside down in a plane,” I say very quietly. “You have to have faith that, despite gravity and everything else that’s working against you, you can turn yourself right again. Like you going up in that Arsenal. You knew it would crash, but you went up anyway because you believed you could turn things around for France.”

I stand, hoping I’ve said enough, but not too much to attract the attention of enemies. “If anyone would like to talk about turning things around, I’ll be upstairs.”

Once in my office, I freeze. A year ago at the newspaper there were no consequences for running an anti-Nazi enterprise. Now there are. Neither Vichy France nor the Nazis will tolerate treason.

Then my friend from downstairs appears in the doorway, another man beside him.

We stare at one another.

I need to say something because the silence has gone on for so long that it is its own musical score.

Think of each piece of information as a twig, Navarre said to me the day the H?tel des Sports opened. One is inconsequential. But gather enough and you can make a bonfire.

Which makes me the girl in the forest collecting firewood, always on the lookout for wolves. How do you spot a wolf?

They have yellow eyes.

The pilot has eyes the color of chestnuts: Christmas and family and warmth. His hair is neatly combed and his trim little mustache looks to have just been smoothed down with water.

You only present yourself carefully if you’re worried you might fail. Oh . He thinks I might reject him .

He has no idea I need all the help I can get.

The man beside him is so young. Maybe the same age I was when I went to Morocco, back when I didn’t understand that my husband’s black eyes disguised the fact that his love was a weapon, trained on me.

This man’s eyes are as round as medals, lending him the same air of principle.

“Come in,” I tell them.

“Maurice Coustenoble,” the brown-eyed one says. “And this is Henri Schaerrer. Ex-navy.”

From out of his pocket, Coustenoble pulls papers scribbled with names and addresses. “These people all want to turn things around for France. But not Vichy France.”

I reach for the pieces of paper. Every name listed is a potential go-between who’ll find people out there who know how many pens are being built in the new U-boat nest in Bordeaux, which factories are now making munitions instead of cars. I’ll teach them all to eavesdrop, to memorize everything, to never carry notes.

I do know what I’m doing.

Coustenoble says, “If every Frenchman really wanted to let the Germans rule us, then the air force would have saved the Arsenal. I’m on the side of anyone who thinks flying an almost empty airplane is an act of hope. I decided to find others who believed that, too.”

“We’ve been talking to people on trains and in bars, writing everything down,” Schaerrer finishes.

These two are exactly what I need: people with the optimistic conviction that scribbling names onto a piece of paper will make a difference, and the indefatigableness to do it in the first place.

“No more writing things down,” I say. “Or, if you do, use tiny pieces of paper that you can slip into a slit in a seam. I’ll show you.”

And so it begins.

—

Under the banner of the Légion francaise des combattants, we’re relatively safe in the free zone. The Vichy government doesn’t have any idea that people are working against them, and only Nazis from the Armistice Commission are permitted here. So I interview the men from Coustenoble and Schaerrer’s list and enroll some in our crusade.

They all know of Navarre, the Great War hero turned rebel. He’s the reason they come. When they discover they’re meeting a woman, some flee. Others try to strong-arm me into a kiss, but they don’t know I’ve seen plenty of street fights in Shanghai and Morocco and that a pair of scissors from my desktop makes an excellent substitute for a dagger.

Coustenoble, having heard another scuffle upon his return from recruiting truck drivers, bursts into my office, but the offender is already making a hasty retreat.

“Problem?” Coustenoble asks.

“Solution,” I say, holding up the scissors.

I’m making myself more of an outcast than ever, but I’m happy upstairs among the mavericks and life livers. Soon I have fifteen people sending me information.

I send Schaerrer to Marseille—where ships, supplies, people, and secrets enter and leave France—to find someone who could start an outpost there. I hang maps on the walls and I mark the locations of the munitions factories and aircraft manufacturing plants the informants tell me about—all potential bombing targets for the British.

If we can get in touch with them.

That’s Navarre’s job. Mine is recruiting, which I do well into the new year, until an air force commander enters the H?tel des Sports one day in February. His height is what makes me look up, my attention caught by the head above the crowd. And what a head it is, as perfectly sculpted as a Rodin visage.

Mon Dieu . In seven years of separation, while I might have occasionally admired a handsome face, I’ve never compared one to a masterwork.

Before my thoughts run any wilder, I retreat upstairs. The man has arrived with General Baston, a former air force general who’s running a statistics department for Pétain and who’s also one of Navarre’s informants. I expect Baston will follow me up shortly and he does.

“This is Commandant Léon Faye.” Baston gestures to the man beside him. “Deputy chief of the air force in North Africa. Fifteen minutes ago, I had to stop him from punching Pétain. I told him he’d find fools of similar temperament here.”

Baston doesn’t know what to make of me. Pretty women, he told me at our first meeting, belong at their husbands’ sides. He shies away if I get too near, worried my unorthodoxies are contagious. But he’s doggedly loyal to Navarre, and we need someone in the Vichy government on our side, so I ignore the comment about fools.

Léon smiles at this assessment of us and I can’t help but return the gesture. His position in the air force explains his self-confidence and air of command, qualities that would make him an ideal agent in North Africa. The fact that he also has a strongly cast jawline and thick, dark hair is absolutely redundant.

I push myself up from the desk, flee to the cognac decanter even though it’s barely midday, and pour out three glasses.

“What brings you here from Algiers?” I ask, fixing my attention on business.

“I came to ask Pétain for more men and money for my squadrons,” Léon says, a hint of fire still sparking in each word.

He doesn’t sit and nor do I, although Baston drops heavily into a chair. A dozen sheets of paper flutter with agitation.

“I thought there were patriots in Vichy who’d want the air force to be equipped to fight for France when the time is right.” Léon swallows the brandy in two gulps.

“Pétain refused,” I guess.

Some military men, who’ve been trained to fight for their country—to lay down their lives for it—believe Pétain is planning to equip the armed forces to rise up against the Nazis. Léon Faye must believe that, too. But Pétain will never bite the hand that’s given him a banquet. No, he wants to gorge himself—while taking away our ability to eat.

Abortion has been declared treasonous, punishable by death. It’s now illegal for women to work in the public sector. Laws from forty years ago that prohibit women from having control over the money they earn have just been reintroduced. And divorce laws have become more restrictive, which means that if Pétain and the Nazis stay in power, I’ll have to live out my life as Edouard’s wife, never knowing the kind of love that makes you feel as though a symphony has been played on your heart.

I almost surrendered myself to my husband seven years ago. I have no intention of surrendering to Hitler.

I take a seat at my desk and Léon sits opposite me. “I don’t need Pétain,” he fumes. “You’re here with Navarre because you think there’s still a fight to be had. Well, I have the air force on our side in both Algiers and Tunisia. I’ve secured the navy’s assistance, too. And I’m working on the army.”

“To do what?” I ask, unable to stop myself from leaning forward. I’m speechless at the audacity. Navarre’s always said intelligence is the only weapon we have right now. That we’ll fight with real weapons later. But Léon is saying…

“We can fight the Germans now. Starting in North Africa, with the French forces we have there.”

It’s the most reckless plan I’ve ever heard. “You’re mad.”

Baston finally agrees with me on something. “ Il a une araignée au plafond. ”

Yes, Léon Faye definitely has spiders in the ceiling.

“Better to be mad and right than sane and submissive,” Léon fires back, tapping a cigarette from a case as furiously as if it’s the French prime minister he’d been prevented from punching earlier. “If I settle for the latter, I’ll be dead in a few months when the Nazis pour into Algiers and occupy that, too. They will, you know. But if I attack first, then I at least have a chance of living through it.”

Baston rumples his hair to the point of almost tearing it out. “I’ll get Navarre.”

But I’m worried Navarre will fall for Léon Faye’s damn fool plot, too.

Baston gone, Léon and I regard each other over the desk, partners in aims but enemies in methods. The hand gripping his cigarette relaxes a little and he says, “You called me mad and I called you submissive. I’m not making a good first impression.”

I smile. “Maybe you’re impassioned rather than insane.”

“Well, I’m happy to accept any description that has the word passion in it,” he says with a grin, and I laugh. He’s flirting, but in a way that’s more charming than annoying.

Except that, beneath the banter, we’re talking about launching a coup in North Africa.

It’s time to ignore the charm. “I agree there’s a fight to be had,” I say. “But not yet. Right now we need to gather intelligence and wait. Most of all, we need someone in North Africa.”

He leans back in his chair, one restless hand turning a Gauloises pack over and over. Instead of discussing my proposal, he asks, “How did you like Morocco? I was stationed there for years. The duke of Magenta is a good friend.”

If Léon is a friend of Maurice’s, then hopefully it means that whatever he knows of me, it’s that my greatest fault was loving my children, and of believing myself to be more than the one thing my husband allowed me to be: Mrs. Edouard Méric.

“I adored it. Occasionally I hated it.”

Léon’s smile is surprisingly gentle for a man who’s just sparred with Pétain. “Brutal and luminous,” he says.

Yes, I want to say. Exactly . But he shifts the conversation again, asking, “What are you fighting for?”

He’s the first person who’s asked me this and I almost snap a retort at the condescension that probably lurks beneath the question. But Léon’s expression is curious, as if he’s looking for someone who wants the same thing he does.

“I have two children,” I say very carefully, because thinking about how long it’s been since I held them makes me want to cry, and speaking of them is the hardest thing of all. “I never want…”

Béatrice’s blond hair unfurls in my mind. My hands quiver, wanting to braid those tresses. Are they still long, falling to the middle of her back?

Mothers should know those things. But I only know this: “I never want my children to believe that their mother taught them to sit back and accept something that they know is wrong.”

I almost don’t add this last thing, but it spills out. “My youngest is a girl, and I can’t bear her knowing only a world that shuts women in a trap from the moment they’re born. Based on what’s happened in Germany, the Nazis are readying that trap for France.”

Léon is silent for a moment, staring at the empty glass in his hand. Then he says softly, “That’s worth fighting for.”

Our eyes meet. In his, I see, hopelessly, the glitter of stars in the black Shanghai sky. “What are you fighting for?” I ask, voice low.

“My father was a policeman,” he replies, mouth quirking at the surprise that flashes across my face. Like Edouard, like General Baston, like Navarre, most high-ranking military men come from a narrow band of moneyed society who have the pedigree to get into the école superiéure de guerre. A policeman’s son has no pedigree at all.

“I joined the army at seventeen, didn’t even finish high school,” he says, unabashed. “But I was a great pilot. When the air force invited me to apply to the école supérieure, I buried myself in books for months to get in. And I prefer what I had—a knowledge from the cradle that I could achieve anything I worked at, a knowledge of what was right and what was wrong, and the belief that I should do whatever I could to stand firm with the former. I don’t want all the other small boys in small towns in France to grow up mistaking evil for honor.”

He pauses, but I sense he isn’t finished.

“And?” I pass him another cigarette.

He shrugs, but the ferocity is back in his voice when he replies, “My older brother and my brother-in-law, two people I was closer to than anyone, died in the Great War fighting the Germans. If I do nothing, it’s like saying they were worthless cannon fodder.”

A man who thinks not just of himself, but of those who might come after him and those who came before him—ghosts who will never force him to pay that debt of honor—is someone I want to talk to more. But I shouldn’t. A man driven by the kind of love that drives Léon Faye—love for honor and country—will be a fine soldier, but a fine heartbreaker, too.

Then he adds, “Now I’m also fighting for you—so that your wish might come true.”

Through the window comes the sound of a string quartet playing in the neighboring hotel, where Nazis dine with Vichy collaborators. I keep the window open because they play delightfully and, I like to think, subversively. Today they’ve chosen Mozart’s Dissonance quartet, and they go straight into the Andante Cantabile, four stringed instruments singing as if they’re on the edge of weeping.

I close my eyes. There is tenderness. There is passion. There is darkness. There is all of life in the touch of a bow on a string. How can we make something so exquisite—and then turn around and kill our neighbors?

“I love this piece,” I say, opening my eyes. “I like to think they’re playing it because it’s the only way they can cry. It’s their protest, perfectly hidden in music.”

“Just like you hide your protests behind an officer’s club and…” Léon hesitates only as long as the beat of a semiquaver before adding, voice low, “a beautiful smile.”

I never flush, not anymore. I gave it up the first time my husband ordered me to stay at home. But now I flush like I’m seventeen again and have no idea that love is just the same as war.

—

Like Navarre, I live at the H?tel des Sports. I get up around five in the morning, accustomed to my son Christian’s sparrow-like hours. I use the bathroom down the hall before anyone is awake, hurrying through my ablutions—one of the elderly guests is either deaf to the sound of someone in there or determined to catch me au naturel .

Alone in that tiny bathroom, lit by one bulb and shadowed by black mold, I dwell on the things I miss. Freshly squeezed orange juice. In Morocco, I used to drink it with breakfast, and I planted an orange tree in our courtyard when I returned to Paris. Cosmetics. I have half a lipstick left and my face powder’s almost gone.

I glide the barest hint of color onto my lips, decide I can go without powder, and know I’m thinking about these unimportant things to avoid thinking about the things I miss most of all. I’d give up orange juice, lipstick, warm baths, and almost everything else for my children. And my mother and sister, too.

Yet here I am in Vichy, not giving up this work.

I run from my reflection in the mirror, almost knocking over the old gentleman outside. “Perhaps that will teach you to knock,” I snap.

Which is my pain talking.

“ Désolée, ” I whisper before hurrying downstairs to where the truck drivers are arriving, bringing in food for the Légion and messages from our agents. I sit with them in the kitchen, drinking ersatz café nationale, smoking cigarettes, and enchanting them with Moroccan anecdotes. I catch myself sometimes, the colonizer making the colonized into a fable, treating their culture like a curiosity. Today is one of those days, and the shame makes the chicory sit like wood in my stomach and my desperation for a real coffee drunk at my kitchen table with my children almost unbearable.

But, to gather enough intelligence for the Allies, I have to tell stories. The truck drivers love them, and I need them to keep bringing me tightly folded pieces of paper. So I persuade myself it’s indigestion that’s bothering me, rather than my conscience.

The drivers prefer gruesome tales of pomp and splendor arrayed around violence, so I describe the ceremony of the Sacrifice of the Sheep, where a rider galloped from the msalla into Rabat with a sheep that had had its throat expertly slit slung across his saddle. If the sheep was still alive when it reached Rabat, it was a good omen for the Sultan.

“Not so good for the sheep,” I conclude. They howl and pass me little squares of paper, warmed by camaraderie, and I know they’ll return next week with more.

By late morning, I’m in my office reading through the notes, which tell me about decoy airfields the British are bombing because they don’t know the locations of the real ones, and rumors the Nazis will invade Russia, their ally.

“That can’t be true,” I say to Navarre when he passes by, shocked that even Hitler would attack his friends.

“Find out more,” he says, and I cross to my map, considering which of the fifty agents we now have in our ranks will be able to tackle such a risky piece of sleuthing.

That’s where Léon Faye finds me. He’s returning to North Africa and his mad but audacious plot, which Navarre, just as I’d feared, has given his blessing to. But he’s also agreed to become the leader of our new North African sector.

Léon holds out a package. “For you.”

I try to nonchalantly unpeel the paper but end up tearing off at least half. Inside, I find a cake of Moroccan black soap, like the one Edouard wouldn’t let me buy. I inhale the scent as deeply as if I’m planning to eat it.

I look up at Léon. He’s watching me with a smile I don’t know how to interpret. Does he think that with one bar of soap I’ll tumble into his arms? Or is he happy because, for a moment, I was, too?

“You brought soap with you from Algiers,” I say as I rewrap it. “You were planning to seduce someone?”

“I was just hoping to talk to someone besides pilots. Most of them don’t use soap.” His tone is easygoing, his expression intent.

It’s almost impossible to look away.

But…

“Coustenoble!” I call.

He bounds in.

“Give this to one of the men.” I pass him the soap, hiding my reluctance beneath a quip. “I’m sure half of them haven’t bathed since the occupation.”

Léon surprises me by bursting into laughter. Coustenoble leaves with the soap and a bemused expression. And I tell Léon, “I’m married.”

Despite not having seen my husband for seven years. Despite knowing I’ll never see him again.

“That’s why I only offered you soap,” he says, eyes two licks of flame that suggest he has so much more to offer me than soap.

It’s a look that makes even my insides flush.

How many men, when wanting more, take nothing—but give a little instead?

“I will see you again,” he says when he leaves, and it sounds like a future rather than just a dream.

—

The following week, I stare at papers, foot tapping restless staccato beats on the floor. Our agents have told us so many things. But Navarre says we still don’t have enough to approach the British.

This is why men plot coups and get thrown in jail for treason—doing something bold keeps you from thinking how it would feel to lose. Thankfully Schaerrer appears before I do something reckless too, and I realize this is like being a mother. Some days you do the most minute tasks over and over, no matter how futile they seem. Someone has to find agents and collate their information so that there’s something left to fight with if the coups fail.

Schaerrer’s face is so lit up he needs his own blackout shade. “I found someone in Marseille who wants to talk,” he bursts out.

It’s my turn for boldness, at last. If I can set up a successful Marseille sector, then we’ll be able to tell the British the movements and cargo of every ship into and out of Marseille.

I ask Schaerrer to set up a meeting, and he’s only just left when I hear Navarre marching down the hall. “Look!” he shouts, holding out a newspaper. On the front is a photograph of Pétain shaking hands with Hitler. Beneath are the words, attributed to Pétain: I enter today on the path of collaboration.

“Our Marshal will now officially collaborate with the Germans across all zones,” Navarre says, fury in his voice. “He’s going to let the French police work with the Nazis to ferret out any opposition.”

Which means they suspect that, somewhere, there is opposition.

The danger of what we’re doing has just increased a hundredfold. But I airplane the newspaper into the trash can.

“More people might join us, now they know Pétain’s true colors. Someone in Marseille is interested. And we have all of this.” I gesture to my folders of intelligence. “Maybe it’s time to go to the British.”

And Navarre finally agrees!

But the obvious question is: How?

The government will notice if Navarre vanishes for what’s likely to be weeks. Britain is enemy territory. It’s forbidden to travel there. He’ll have to take a ship to Morocco, then stow away on another ship to Gibraltar, where they might well throw an unauthorized French traveler into prison as a spy.

“I’ll tell Vichy I’m ill,” he says, hands still clenched into fists of fury. “That I need to rest and recuperate. But the burden will be on you to charm them if they come to investigate. You’ll be directly in their firing line.”

Yesterday I’d have waved that off. But after Pétain’s announcement, Navarre’s words are like a cloud bank swallowing up the plane you’re flying. The only thing you can be certain of is that the cloud is a cold knife pressed against your neck.