Sisters of the Resistance

by Christine Wells

  Louise Dulac said, “Yvette, you must take these back to my jeweler immediately to get them restrung. I want particularly to wear the pearls with the black Balmain the very night I return to Paris.”

  “You want me to go now?” said Yvette. “But how will I get there, mademoiselle?”

  “I don’t care how you get there! You can walk for all I care.” She blew out a breath. “Borrow a bicycle. You can ride, can’t you?”

  Conscious that Helga was enjoying this exchange, Yvette put a whine into her voice. “But if I leave now, I will still be riding after curfew, mademoiselle.”

  “I’ll get the ambassador to give you a travel pass. You can show that to anyone who tries to stop you.”

  After the pearls had been safely decanted into the case, Dulac said, “I’ll have the travel pass for you after dinner. Then you can be off.”

  * * *

  WHILE HELGA WENT down to the servants’ hall for her evening meal, Yvette lay fully clothed in their shared attic bedroom, trying to rest. There was a long bicycle ride ahead of her and it would be a wonderful thing if she could catch some sleep before she left. However, of course it was impossible to calm herself enough to doze.

  When the door opened, she started upright, heart thudding in her chest. It was Louise.

  Yvette blew out a breath, the heel of her hand kneading her breastbone. “You scared me.”

  “You are on edge. It is not to be wondered at.” Dulac came over to her, sat on the bed, and took her hand. “As you’ve probably guessed by now, I work for the resistance.” She licked her lips. “My contact has not shown up here tonight, so I must ask something more of you. I did not think I would have to do it, but . . .”

  A cold finger stroked Yvette’s spine. “What is it?”

  “I need to get into Obersturmbannführer Werner’s room later tonight, once he has dismissed his valet.” Her tone grew curt. “I need you to distract him.”

  “Me?” Yvette reared back, instantly comprehending what Louise was asking. “Why don’t you distract him while I search?”

  “Oh, you can read German, then, can you, Yvette? You would know how to find what you are looking for among his papers?”

  “N-no, but—”

  “Besides, there is Gruber. I cannot take the risk.” Her grey eyes held such intensity, Yvette felt mesmerized. “Listen to me, Yvette. There is no time to argue. You must do this. There is no other way.”

  Everything inside Yvette screamed against obeying her. Vidar had been right to warn her against coming here, after all. “I can’t,” she whispered. “I—mademoiselle, I don’t even know how.”

  Louise gave a harsh little laugh. “You don’t need to know how. Trust me, with a man like that it won’t take much.”

  Yvette stared. Was that supposed to reassure her?

  Dulac looked at her watch. “He is coming to see you in my suite at midnight. Now, there isn’t much time. Get down there and make yourself presentable. Put on one of my negligees if you like. I’ve already dismissed Helga for the evening.”

  The thought of carrying out these instructions made Yvette’s insides churn. She gripped Dulac’s hands, trying to make a connection with her emotions. They were no longer the delivery girl and the movie star, but two agents working for France. “At least tell me why I am doing this. I think if I knew why, I could . . .” Actually, she was certain that she could not do it under any circumstances. Her mind was scurrying to and fro, like a mouse trapped in a maze. There must be another way.

  Dulac leaned in closer to murmur in her ear. “There is a munitions store nearby. Werner inspected it today. I need to read his report and send the information back to my people.”

  “How long do you need for this?” Yvette asked.

  She shrugged. “Twenty minutes? Half an hour, perhaps.”

  Yvette clutched her wrist. “It would make sense if you interrupted us before he . . . I mean, it’s your suite, after all.”

  “He would think that strange, given I will be the one who has sent him there to be with you.”

  “But you could come up with some excuse. I know you could.” Yvette tightened her hold, her eyes pleading with Louise to agree.

  The actress smiled, a little sadly, Yvette thought. “Your virtue is so important to you, Yvette? Do you think God will send you to hell if you do this?”

  Yvette glanced away. Her relationship with God was none of Dulac’s business. “I do not think it unreasonable that I would prefer not to do this thing for the first time with a man I have never met, and one who is most probably ugly and a dirty Boche into the bargain.”

  “Werner is no Errol Flynn but he is not dirty, I assure you. In fact, he is extremely fastidious.” Louise fixed her with a sharp, assessing gaze completely alien to the purring screen goddess she played when Gruber was around. “All right, Yvette. I see that you will not be persuaded. I will interrupt you as soon as I’m finished searching his room. I’ll make up some excuse.”

  Yvette was left feeling as if she was putting up a great fuss about nothing. She lowered her gaze, flushing with humiliation.

  Louise put a fingertip beneath her chin and lifted it, bent to look into her eyes. “Courage, my dear. Such tasks are not pleasant, but in this war we have to bear much that is unpleasant. I will get the information and give you the case of pearls for the jeweler with a coded message inside. Then you need to be away as quickly as possible.”

  She left before Yvette could say any more. Yvette tried to calm herself and think, but fear overtook her reasoning faculties. She knew well enough the means Louise wanted her to use to distract the Obersturmbannführer, but she couldn’t do it. She had always thought she could die for France. Truthfully, dying seemed preferable to letting some horrible Nazi use her like a prostitute.

  She had to keep him with her for twenty minutes. Thirty, perhaps. She must think of a way to stall for that long, just until Louise came back.

  * * *

  DULAC’S SUITE WAS candlelit and slightly stuffy, with deep, long shadows on the walls. Yvette turned on the lights, banishing the gloom. She blew out the candles and watched the wisps of smoke curl upward from their wicks.

  The large clam bed, with its mother-of-pearl headboard and rich satin coverlet, made her shudder. This was not what she’d thought she’d signed up for when she had agreed to help Louise Dulac.

  The actress had told her to make herself presentable. Yvette went into the bathroom and looked about her. On the counter ranged a plethora of unguents and cosmetics, marshaled into organized rows by Helga, no doubt. With shaking hands, Yvette washed her face and tidied herself a little, but not too much. Ordinarily she would have reveled in the luxury of real, scented soap and expensive perfume, but now she felt like a leg of lamb dressing herself for dinner.

  So this was real intelligence work if you were a woman. What a stupid girl she had been, abandoning her courier job for this, thinking she’d been cut out for better things.

  She looked around the bedroom, searching for inspiration. The chess set? Her father had taught her how to play. She would challenge Werner to a game. Her lips twisted. Hardly a more attractive pursuit than lovemaking, she supposed—at least, not from his point of view. She would have to come up with something else.

  She was still trying to think of an alternative when the door opened, making her jump. Heart thundering in her chest, she turned to see a uniformed officer in the doorway. He was lean and sharp faced, with very pale skin. His high cheekbones bore the slashing scars of the ceremonial duel. An aristocrat, then. Not one of Hitler’s bourgeois bullies.

  Something flickered in his pale eyes as they contemplated her. Contempt? Yvette flinched, though the contempt of such a man should not have hurt her. Her mind warred with itself. Perhaps she ought to have put on one of Dulac’s negligees. She didn’t want him to leave immediately in disgust, after all.

  He stepped into the room, then turned to shut the door behind him. He did not seem inclined to speak, so she felt comp
elled to say something, to break that awful, tense silence.

  “Good evening, Herr Obersturmbannführer.” She turned to indicate the game set up in the window embrasure. “May I offer you a game of chess?”

  He frowned. “I did not come here to play chess.” He looked very grim for a man who anticipated an evening of pleasure.

  “I am quite good,” she lied. “Can it be, mein Herr, that you are afraid of being beaten by a girl?”

  He didn’t even react to the pert jibe. His gaze swept her body. “I am a busy man, mademoiselle. I did not come here to play games. Of any kind. If you will be so good as to take your clothes off, we can begin.”

  His French was very good. Yvette was shaking inside, but the only choice was to be bold. If she did not go on the offensive, she would have to submit entirely. The way he behaved, the entire encounter might be over before the twenty minutes was up.

  She gave him an arch look. “I do not know what the custom is in your country, but here in France, we do not rush these things. We drink wine, we converse a little.” She indicated the board again. “We play some chess. It, er, it builds anticipation, you see.”

  A muscle twitched at the edge of his mouth. Whether it was amusement or anger at being instructed on lovemaking by a girl half his age, she couldn’t tell. Probably the latter. “Not interested, mademoiselle.” He started toward her.

  Her throat contracted but she managed to say, “A drink, at least?” She glanced at the champagne in its sweating silver bucket.

  He hesitated, then relented, crossing to the sideboard and yanking the champagne out of its nest of ice. He fiddled with the cork. “You want anticipation?” With a wave of his hand, he gestured to the bed, where Louise had laid out a lacy white negligee. “Why don’t you put that on? Then we drink champagne.”

  Yvette could not help it. She glanced at the clock. The seconds seemed to drag by.

  She had scorned to make herself attractive for him, but this might be the only way to stall a little longer. “All right.” She snatched up the negligee and fled to the en suite before he could stop her. She had to force herself not to slam the door.

  This had not been a good start. Gripping the marble counter of the vanity, she tried to calm herself. He was even worse than she’d expected. So utterly cold, so intent on his purpose. No big-bellied, slobbering drunk, who might have been easier to hoodwink. Nor did he seem likely to be charmed by any woman, much less one who did not know the first thing about seduction.

  She stared into the mirror. Her face was flushed dark pink—so much for keeping cool under pressure. She crushed the negligee in her hand, then turned and hurled it at the door. It dropped in a limp heap on the floor. Kneading her forehead with her knuckles, she paced the small room, trying to think.

  There came a heavy tread outside the door. “Don’t be too long, mademoiselle. The champagne is waiting. As am I.”

  With trembling fingers, slowly, Yvette unbuttoned her blouse.

  Chapter Eighteen

  England, February 1947

  YVETTE

  As it happened, Yvette’s noble sacrifice was not required. Maman scoffed at the notion that she could not manage very well as concierge while Gabby was gone. Observing Gabby’s nervous vacillations over whether to go at all, Yvette decided to ask Monsieur Dior for Friday off so that she might accompany her sister as far as London and then return to Paris on Sunday. She politely refused Audrey’s invitation to join them in the country, however. She needed to be back for Louise Dulac’s trial, which would begin on Monday. Besides, she did not at all wish to intrude on Gabby’s reunion with Jack.

  London was grim and falling down around them, still blackened and shattered from the Blitz. The winter had been bitterly cold, which they’d discovered firsthand the night before, when they ran out of coins to feed the meter that operated the radiator in their rented room. Audrey had told them the coal heaps had frozen and there were rolling power cuts across the nation.

  And now, here they were, shivering outside their bed-and-breakfast in Baker Street, snow squeaking beneath their boots as they stamped them to keep warm. Yet, hope shone like a beacon from Gabby’s face. Audrey was coming to collect Gabby and whisk her off to the family home.

  “I can’t believe you’re abandoning me,” said Gabby. She held her hand out, palm downward. “See how I am shaking!”

  Yvette pulled her in for a swift, hard hug. “You will be fine. Better than fine.”

  Gabby bit her lip. “Audrey said you were most welcome.”

  Yvette smiled at that and linked her arm through her sister’s. “No, my mind is made up. I wouldn’t have come at all, but it was clear that you needed me to stop you from jumping into the channel and swimming back to France.”

  Yvette did wonder why, if he was in love with her, this Jack had not come to the medal ceremony himself. Indeed, why had he not come to Paris the second he was able?

  Having gained a little experience with men while in New York, Yvette wanted to urge caution but held her tongue. It would be decidedly out of character for hers to be the voice of reason, and in this mood, Gabby would not thank her for it.

  Love makes us all stupid, Yvette said to herself. But it is good to be stupid once in a while.

  Finally, Audrey arrived in a car so small, it looked like a toy, and Gabby picked up her suitcase.

  Yvette kissed her warmly on both cheeks. “You will telephone to let me know you have arrived and that you are well, yes?”

  “I’ll try. Oh, but I wish you would come,” said Gabby for the millionth time.

  “No, and no, and no,” Yvette said to her. “Be brave, sister. Remember, you have that medal now.”

  When Gabby hugged her in a final goodbye, a tightness in Yvette’s chest she hadn’t been aware of until now seemed to fall away. She hoped with all her heart that her sister would find happiness with Jack. She and Gabby were both making new beginnings now. They could never leave the past behind, but they could try to focus on the road ahead.

  Once her sister left, Yvette had no desire to linger in the tiny room they’d rented. Despite the bitter cold, she dug her hands into her coat pockets and went for a walk.

  A fine drizzle had begun to fall miserably from the iron-grey sky. The power cuts meant that many businesses and tea shops had simply shut their doors, so there were few places to find warmth and shelter. Yvette wandered the city, growing increasingly dispirited, and after nursing a glass of foul-tasting wine in the one pub she found open, she turned back toward the bed-and-breakfast. She was nearly there when she spied one attraction that seemed to be operating: Madame Tussaud’s. She shrugged and paid the admission.

  The wax museum was lit only with candles and gas lamps that cast spooky shadows over the displays. Yvette looked around her with a creeping feeling of unease. Even the wax models of perfectly pleasant people seemed macabre, like effigies that might at any moment come to life.

  She stopped in front of the hated image of Adolf Hitler, modeled, so the guidebook told her, before the war. As Yvette stared into those fanatical eyes, she could not repress a cold shiver of fear and loathing. She had a sudden wish for a furnace, so that she could shove him in and watch him melt.

  “If you keep staring at him like that, you’ll turn into a statue, too,” murmured a low voice in her ear.

  She started, put a hand to her chest. Vidar! What on earth was he doing, following her to another country? She turned to face him. The dim lighting created shadows, deepened the lines that bracketed his mouth. He looked older than he had back at the Ritz, and twice as grim.

  “Shall we?” He offered his arm. “I know a snug little place in Mayfair.”

  Yvette ignored his arm and walked on. “But the ticket was expensive. I want to get my money’s worth.”

  She stopped in front of the display of the Terror. Before the war, the models that re-created victims of the guillotine might have chilled her, but she had seen real death, real suffering, and the pretend beheadings of arist
ocratic women seemed to belong to a fairy-tale world far away.

  “Madame Tussaud herself barely escaped the guillotine,” said Vidar. “A resourceful and enterprising woman.”

  “Really? I didn’t know.” Yvette hesitated. “I’m not sure why, but creating wax figures seems a tawdry skill compared with sculpting marble, say. And yet I suppose there must be skill involved.”

  “Hm.” Vidar scanned the room, expressionless. “It’s not to my taste, certainly. I prefer art to be more abstract.”

  “Of course you do,” she muttered. And if it came out as a criticism, she didn’t care. It was cool but stuffy among the exhibits and she wanted to leave very much, but as long as they wandered between the waxworks, she could stave off the conversation Vidar clearly wished to have with her.

  Eventually, she could no longer pretend the wax statues of people she’d never heard of interested her in the slightest. They emerged into the biting fresh air. The rain had stopped for the moment, leaving the footpaths slippery and the gutters filled with dirty slush. Their breaths clouded and the clouds mingled. She turned away. “I’m famished,” she said briskly. “Where did you say this place is?”

  * * *

  SITTING SIDE BY side in a corner booth in a candlelit dining room at an exclusive gentlemen’s club, Yvette and Vidar ate Dover sole and game pie and a dessert called Eton mess that contained more sugar in one bite than Yvette had consumed throughout the entire war.

  “Ordinarily, they use fresh strawberries,” said Vidar with a wryly apologetic twist to his mouth. “Tinned cherries don’t quite measure up.”

  She put down her spoon, unable to eat any more of this dessert that made her teeth ache. What a waste. And what a luxury not to have to consume everything on her plate in case she didn’t get to eat again for some time. In New York, the food had been abundant but her finances had not. Often, she ate soup from a can or tinned beans for her supper.

  The restaurant was dim and cozy and Vidar had plied her with wine, so she was feeling quite mellow when finally he said, “You wanted to know why I can’t testify for Louise.” He dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. “It’s because I am still working undercover.”