This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2017
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For Barbara Warner Howard
Contents
Start Reading
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Nine Months Later
Discovering witnesses is just as important as catching criminals.
—Simon Wiesenthal
Prologue
Paris 1943
The average life expectancy for a radio operator in occupied France was six weeks. Marie Claire was going on six months. Although time had long run out, she was still transmitting. The SS had already captured every other wireless operator, and she knew she had just a short while until the van circling Paris would detect her signal, too. Her supervisor, the indomitable Miss Chapman, had repeatedly called her back to London, but Marie Claire knew that without her, the vital communications between the French Resistance and its London headquarters would be severed.
The carefree Paris of her youth was now littered with giant red-and-black swastika flags. Gangly German soldiers on leave from the eastern front didn’t think twice about asking her to the Deutsches Soldatenkino to see propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s latest anti-Semitic offering.
She tried to remain inconspicuous as she carried the thirty-pound suitcase of equipment that pulled her slightly down to one side like a bombardier fixing on its target. Walk straight, she commanded herself as she painfully leveled out her gait, ignoring the ache in her arm. One would think that after six months of lugging the wireless transmitter she’d be used to this, but there were many things she still wasn’t used to, like the SS military band marching up the Champs-Élysées every day at noon, blasting out the peppy, almost friendly military march “Preussens Gloria.”
Conscious that the wooden soles of her shoes (all the rubber had gone to the war effort) made a sound akin to a lame horse on cobblestone, Marie Claire felt even more vulnerable that late February morning. She turned a corner and almost walked into a street cleaner plucking a cigarette butt from the midst of his circle of detritus. She watched as he put it into his pocket to save for later. Like most men left in Paris, he was old, the young ones deported to work for the Third Reich in Germany. She walked on until she reached the address that Michel had given her. This was to be her last transmission; she’d be picked up within the week. Miss Chapman wanted her back, and this time she wasn’t taking no for an answer. One last transmission and she’d be in London, living a monotonous life with her mother.
Michel had passed her the information as they’d walked arm in arm like a pair of lovers in the Jardin de Tuileries. He’d given her a list of coordinates and what ammunition was needed to derail a train carrying supplies to the German troops in the east. Afterward, he’d pressed a key into her hand and whispered the address of the safe house from which to transmit. Then he’d kissed her once on each cheek and left. The exchange had taken less than a minute, but Marie Claire still felt the stubble of his five-o’clock shadow as she walked out the park gates onto the rue de Rivoli, made ugly by the giant swastika flags flapping in the wind.
Marie Claire pushed open the heavy door of the six-story building on rue Laurent-Pichat. A silent zaftig concierge cracked open her door and watched as Marie Claire ascended the steps to the third floor. Unlocking the door to apartment number seven, Marie Claire noticed everything was in disarray, and for a moment she wondered if it was indeed safe to transmit. Something told her to leave immediately, but she’d promised Michel that she would do this one last thing. She unlatched the suitcase and adjusted the crystals within the wireless set. Holding up the steel antenna, she unbolted the casement windows and slapped the metal bars behind laundry hanging from a line. The antenna was barely noticeable, but if anyone looked closely from the street below, the antenna could be seen when the laundry shifted with the wind. The SS van had turned on rue Victor Hugo, coming closer but far enough away still as to not pick up her signal.
She sat cross-legged on the bed and began to tap carefully. First her handle and then her safety word. The latter’s absence would tell London she had been captured and someone else was in control of the wireless. Her transmissions were known to be clear and precise. She tapped out the list of what was needed to derail the train and where the drop was to take place.
The van circled closer, picking up her signal, but the lead went dead.
Inside the apartment, Marie Claire waited for acknowledgment that her information had been received. She watched as the seconds ticked by, and then the minutes, and then an hour on her wristwatch. Finally, the reply: “Received. Wednesday. Usual spot.”
Marie Claire tapped back her response and removed the crystals, grabbed the antenna, and shut the case. Her job was finished; now she had to wait only two days to get out. After closing the case, she heard the concierge yell downstairs-warning her. She stashed the suitcase under the bed and pushed open the window. It was a straight drop down. If she jumped, she’d die, but if captured, she’d be tortured. She decided to jump.
As she was about to leap, the polka-dotted bow on the front of her shoe caught between the window and the ledge. She was trying to disentangle herself when the SS men stormed into the room. Seeing her half out the window, they lunged, grabbing her before she could jump.
Marie Claire remembered what Miss Chapman had taught her: if captured, play for time. She ceased struggling and went limp in their arms.
Chapter One
Paris, 1949
Slim awoke to the sunlight hitting her eyes through the open shutter. Next to her, Daniel lay on his back, her nail marks dug deep into his shoulders. She playfully bit his neck, then his shoulder, and then his arm, but she stopped at the tattooed numbers on his forearm. She couldn’t kiss that one bit of skin. The first time they had gone to bed, Daniel had noticed Slim shy away from the blue numbers crudely engraved into his skin.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” he’d told her.
Still, she could not bring herself to touch that part of him.
Daniel pulled her on top of him and kissed her long and languorously. Afterward, he lit two cigarettes. “You screw like a man,” he said, placing the unfiltered stick into her mouth.
“You’re not the first person to tell me that,” Slim replied in the American-accented French she’d learned at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York City.
She took a long drag and blew smoke straight toward the ceiling. Daniel got up and pulled on his pants.
“Where are you going? I’m not done with you yet,” she said, grabbing the belt loop and embracing him from behind, licking the salt off his back.
“Enough, Slim, I have to go,” Daniel said impatiently.
“Where to besides here? Wouldn’t you rather stay in my a
rms right now?”
Daniel picked up her freckled hands and kissed her palms. “Efraim wants to meet. I must go, or I will be late.”
Slim pulled her hands away. “What is it now?” Anything to do with Efraim meant trouble.
“Slim, I have to go.”
“What about the agency? What about our work?”
They had started the Pitchipoi Agency six months after the Red Cross had closed the repatriation center where Slim had been employed tirelessly for three years. The center had been located in the Hôtel Lutetia, in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés section of Paris, which had, ironically, been the headquarters for the SS during the occupation. Slim’s job was to help repatriate prisoners of war, find homes for displaced persons, and learn what had happened to the families of returnees from the German concentration camps. Even though the Red Cross had closed down the repatriation center, Slim knew there were people still to be found. She and Daniel started the Pitchipoi Agency, so called because, as Daniel told her, it was the term the Polish Jews used in the Drancy transport camp when someone asked where they were being sent. He said it meant imaginary place in Yiddish or Polish; he wasn’t sure which language. It certainly sounded better than where they’d end up: Auschwitz.
Their agency had one purpose: to find out what had happened to people who had been lost during the war. It was her small way of setting things right after so much atrocity. So far, she had solved only two cases. The first, a man who’d been sent to Germany to work in a factory in 1941 and wanted to find out what had happened to his wife and two children. The news was not good, but it wasn’t the bad news he’d thought it would be. His wife turned out to be shacked up with his best friend, who was bringing up her husband’s children as his own. The man thanked Slim and Daniel, then promptly hung himself. The other case, a woman searching for her child who had been hidden with neighbors during the war, had a slightly more positive outcome. Slim had located her daughter in an orphanage in Toulouse. Mother and child were reunited, and they were happily planning to immigrate to the new nation of Israel.
Bringing together a lost family struck a deep and primal chord with Slim. As the only child of the feckless Irish, movie star Tyrone Moran, she had grown up motherless and, if one looked closely, fatherless as well. With a penchant for underage girls and hard liquor, Tyrone had wisely sent his daughter away almost as soon she could swear and curse God. Tyrone Moran may have been a drunk, he may have been a womanizer, but he wasn’t going to have a daughter with a foul mouth taking the Lord’s name in vain. So, Slim had been shipped off to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls school in New York City, where Tyrone would visit her when he wasn’t playing a swashbuckling hero on a movie set. Slim had received a first-rate education, and when the time came, her father had sent her to Trinity, a Catholic women’s college in Washington, D.C., where she’d majored in French literature and Georgetown boys. Her senior year, she’d fallen deeply in love with one of them, a redhead named Patrick McCarthy who had enlisted in the U.S. Navy and become a fighter pilot. He had proposed before he’d shipped out overseas. When his B2 had disappeared in a raid over Germany, Slim’s life as she knew it had disappeared as well. Unable to accept that Patrick was gone and believing he was somehow lost in a POW camp, she’d gone to France in 1945 to work for the Red Cross with the hope of finding him.
Before she’d taken off to war-torn Europe, Tyrone Moran had begged his daughter to stay stateside, but not because he’d feared for her safety. Unbeknownst to her, he was dying of cirrhosis and wanted to spend the time he had left with the child he barely knew. Ignoring his tearful entreaties, Slim had left, anyway, hopeful that maybe she could find Patrick. When her father died a month after she’d arrived in Paris, she learned he’d left his fortune to his only known child. At the tender age of twenty-two, she found herself an heiress, albeit a brokenhearted one.
She’d met Daniel in 1949 at the infamous Left Bank hangout Café le Select. Their attraction had been immediate, and some could say it bordered on the animalistic. In addition to her father’s lustrous auburn hair and green eyes, she had also inherited his libido. With Daniel, she’d met her match.
“You’re not going to tell me where you’re going or who you’re going with?” Slim was annoyed, ravenous from the night of lovemaking, and nauseated from the cigarettes.
“I’m not running off with some other woman, if that’s what’s worrying you. I told you I am meeting Efraim,” Daniel said as he blew rings of smoke toward the painted-tin ceiling. He reached over and stroked her arm playfully. Slim pulled it away. She was in no mood to be placated.
“I am not going away with another woman. I am going away because I have a job to do. That’s all I’m going to tell you.” Daniel stood up and buttoned his pants.
“I wish you would trust me,” Slim said.
“It’s not about trust, Slim. It’s about survival: yours and mine. When you need to know, I will tell you.” Daniel cupped her chin in his hands and kissed Slim roughly on her lips.
“But what if something happens to you?” Slim hated herself for sounding so needy.
“If something happens to me, you will know. Everyone will know. The world will know.”
Slim suddenly felt a chill go up to her spine. “Promise me you won’t do anything foolish, Daniel.”
“I don’t make promises, Slim, especially not to women.” With that, he kissed her again, this time chastely on both cheeks, and left. Naked and alone, Slim punched the bed. As a young child, she had willed herself not to care, not to show emotion, not to be hurt. She knew that despite her best efforts, she was in love with Daniel, and it physically hurt her to be so dependent on someone who gave so little back.
Paris, 1942
Daniel ran toward the building where his extended family all lived on rue de Sévigné. His father and uncles were in the barbershop cutting hair when he burst in dripping with sweat. It was the middle of August, and the air was humid and dank.
“Papa, they’ve rounded up the foreigners,” Daniel said, out of breath.
“Shh,” his father said, annoyed. “You’ll scare Adrienne.”
His five-year-old sister, Adrienne, sat in a chair patiently combing through her doll’s hair.
“What am I supposed to be scared of, Daniel?” Unconcerned, Adrienne’s blue eyes remained fixed on her doll’s head. “There are so many knots, Papa!”
“First, we do your hair, then bebe’s.” His father shot Daniel a look of warning. His father’s brother, Uncle Marcel, whose barber seat was empty, ushered Daniel outside. He took a precious cigarette butt out of a tin container and lit it.
“Has the shop been busy?” Daniel asked. He had been at Efraim’s, the home of his friend from the Sorbonne, where they would have been in their second year if they hadn’t been expelled for being Jewish. They’d tried to continue their work by studying together, but often their sessions would devolve into how they could get back at their enemy occupiers. That afternoon, they had taken a break from their books and discussion and walked over to the bakery when they’d heard the news.
Marcel took another drag. “No, it has been almost empty. Unusual for the afternoon before Shabbat, but what day is usual anymore?” He tugged at the star on his smock and rolled his eyes. “So, who has been rounded up?”
“They’ve rounded up all the foreign Jews and sent them to the Vel’ d’Hiv,” Daniel said.
“The Vel’ d’Hiv?” Marcel asked, his curiosity piqued. Why would they send the foreign Jews to the enormous cycling velodrome outside of Paris? It didn’t make sense.
“On the line outside of Sascha Finkelstein’s bakery, Madame Bernheim told me that ten thousand foreign Jews are being held without any food or water. The bathrooms are overflowing, and there is raw sewage everywhere. People are committing suicide by jumping from the upper levels.”
“Madame Bernheim exaggerates when she tells the time. Enough. They’re probably sending them back to their countries or refugee camps. The Marais i
s crowded enough without every Jew from Poland knocking on our door.”
“What if they come for us?” Daniel asked, feeling panicked now.
“How many times do I have to tell you the Cohens are French? Yes, we are Jews. But first, we are French.” Marcel clipped the end of the cigarette butt with his fingers and put it into the tin and snapped it shut. “Enough, it’s almost Shabbat. Did you bring a challah?”
Daniel handed his uncle the meager loaf he had managed to secure. His grandparents lived on the first floor; his aunt and uncle lived on the second floor with their three young children; the third floor was inhabited by his other uncle, aunt, and widowed uncle and his developmentally disabled son; and finally, on the fourth lived eighteen-year-old Daniel, Adrienne, and his beloved parents. In the front on the first floor was the family business, a barbershop where all the men worked daily except Friday sunset until Saturday sunset. On Fridays, they would convene in his grandparents’ apartment, light the candles, and eat Shabbat dinner together. Even with the roundups, or rafles, as they would come to be known, this Shabbat would not be any different.
Daniel did not broach the subject again until outside of Finkelstein’s bakery a week later, when he heard from Madame Bernheim that the foreign Jews had been sent to an abandoned Dada-inspired housing project in Drancy, a suburb outside of Paris, and then were herded onto trains and shipped east. Daniel could no longer keep quiet. He went straight to his father and uncles in the barbershop and told them what he had heard. This time they did not take the news so lightly. It was too late to hide, and the entire extended Cohen family began to panic. If Drancy was being emptied of the foreign Jews, surely the French Jews would be next.
The roundup of the French Jews began in September, and the fifteen members of the Cohen family were sent to Drancy and then on to Auschwitz. Daniel was the only one to survive.
The Lost Spy (Slim Moran Mysteries) Page 1
