Marya felt the blood drain from her face. “I could be shot.”
“You could be tortured before you are shot or hanged for that matter. You’ll willingly be putting your life in danger.”
“What do I tell my mother?” Marya imagined what her widowed mother, who had never quite gotten over the Russian Revolution, would make of all this.
“You can’t tell your mother—or anyone, for that matter—what you’re doing. So, what do you think?”
“Can I have a couple of weeks to think about it?”
“I’ll give you three days. You should be ready to go over to France by the 1st of September.”
The next morning Marya woke up at six, made a cup of tea, and headed to the typing pool. She found her mind wandering back to what Miss Chapman had said about going behind enemy lines. The requisition forms began to pile up, and her supervisor came over to ask if she was unwell. All around her, she saw women typing like synchronized robots. Marya tried to catch up, but at the end of the day, she was still behind. That night after dinner, she sat with her mother in their parlor, watching the hands on the clock move while listening to her mother catalog the list of jewels she had lost while fleeing Russia in 1917.
“Grandmama gave me that platinum, pearl, and diamond necklace when I became engaged to Papa.”
“Yes, Mama.” How many times had Marya listened to the list of lost riches?
“All gone; I have nothing left.” She had lost her only son in World War I and her husband to the revolution. What she had left sat before her. Marya knew this, but she also knew if she stayed in that suffocating house, she would become as lost as the jewels her mother mourned. When the clock struck eleven, Marya kissed her mother three times, went up to bed, and made the decision that would forever change her life.
She arrived at a large country house, which she thought looked something out of her favorite Evelyn Waugh novel, Brideshead Revisited. She expected a group of boisterous blond men to bound out of the bushes holding bottles of champagne, singing incoherent ditties about naughty French maids. Minutes after she set foot in the great hall hung with faded tapestries of knights jousting and naked women riding unicorns sidesaddle, she decided her mission name would be Marie Claire. (She was told upon accepting the mission, that she could choose her French name.) Marie and Marya both meant Mary albeit in different languages, and Claire for her middle name Calina: that way she would still be connected to her given name. As she was led up four flights of stairs to the children’s nursery, which had been refitted to board four young women, she was told that everyone was to be known only by their first-name aliases.
Trading her green woolen skirt for green woolen pants and her pumps for combat boots, Marie Claire first received training in explosives. The instructor was a practical man with fiery red hair who went by the nickname Torch and was missing three fingers. Marie Claire quickly learned how to detonate a seemingly harmless brick of green Plasticine into an effective incendiary device. She discovered that she rather liked blowing things up and was sad when the day of instruction drew to an end.
“I never saw a lass catch on as quick as you. I bet you could blow up half of Germany’s trains if you put your mind to it.”
Marie Claire was less successful in figuring out how to use the Welrod, a British bolt-action, magazine-fed suppressed pistol intended to fire at point-blank range. Marie Claire immediately recoiled when she pulled the trigger and was almost scared to look at the damage done to the target. Her instructor, a sharpshooter from the First World War, had no patience for her ineptness. “Sending a woman to do a man’s job is like a fish riding a bicycle.”
Marie Claire had to agree. Her hatred of guns had begun early in life when she’d seen her father assassinated at a meeting of White Russians in Berlin by a member of Lenin’s secret police. After her father had been pulled off her small body, Marie Claire had seen her dress covered in his brains and fainted. When she’d finally relayed this rather gruesome moment in her family’s history, after she missed her target for what seemed the fiftieth time, her instructor sent her to lunch and told her not to come back. Her career as a reluctant sharpshooter was over.
After lunch, she was told to report to Chapman, who was spending the week at the run-down country house, supervising and sizing up the new recruits.
“You’re to be trained to be as a wireless operator. We’re going to teach you Morse code so you can send coded messages back to London after you’re dropped in France. You’ll be the third part of the circuit.”
“The circuit?” Marie Claire was hearing so much information that she was starting to get confused.
“The SOE is organized into circuits. Each circuit has three people: the organizer, the courier, and the wireless operator. The organizer rounds up the local Resistance and figures out what they need regarding armaments to commit acts of sabotage.”
“Yesterday I learned how to blow up a train.”
“We’re blowing up more than trains. We’re targeting power stations, dams, anything that gives Germany the ability to carry out this war effectively. Here’s how the circuit works: the organizer tells the courier what they want to destroy, and the courier travels to Paris to give you, the wireless operator, not only this information but also what they need regarding explosives and weapons. The courier is your primary link and the only one you should trust.”
“Are couriers always women?”
“Since all the men in France under forty have been sent to Germany to work, it attracts less attention if we use women as couriers. So yes, your conduit will be a woman. Once you get the message from her, you will send it on to London and wait for a reply.”
“Will I hear immediately?”
“No, sometimes the reply will take hours.”
“So, my chances of getting caught are high.”
“Let’s just say that the average life expectancy for a wireless operator transmitting from France is six weeks.”
Once she was finally off duty, Marie Claire went down to the drawing room and glumly sipped a whiskey. Chapman sidled up to her.
“You look miserable,” she said flatly.
Marie Claire shrugged and took another sip. She hadn’t eaten dinner, and the liquor was making her feel lightheaded.
“Why don’t you put that drink down and take a walk with me,” Chapman said, more as a command than a suggestion.
Marie Claire did as she was told and followed her out into the manicured gardens.
“How these English love their gardens,” Chapman noted as they strolled past the high ornamental hedges. “One day I hope to retire in the country and have one of my own.”
“Aren’t you English?” Marie Claire asked, surprised. Chapman’s accent betrayed nothing. In fact, it was so posh, there was a rumor going around that she was somehow related to the royal family.
“By way of Romania. Let’s just say that I put on a good show. I’m more British than the British. Follow me; I want to show you something.”
Marie Claire pulled up the collar of her jacket. The fall was beginning to have some bite. Chapman brought her to a gazebo.
“What’s so special about this?” Marie Claire was tired and longed for the lumpy cot she called her bed.
“Look.” Chapman pointed upward to five Bristol Buckinghams flying in formation against the late summer sky “They’re going to bomb the hell out of Germany, and then you’re going to put the final nail in Germany’s coffin.”
“You told me I have a life expectancy of six weeks if I’m to become a wireless operator.”
“You should consider yourself lucky. The life expectancy of an RAF bomber crew is two weeks.” Chapman put her hand on Marie Claire’s shoulder. “You don’t have to do this, you know. You can walk out those doors tomorrow and go back to the typing pool.”
“I don’t want to die. I want to have a life.”
“We all die, you know. And the life you have or don’t have is not always determined by you.”
&nbs
p; “I don’t want to leave my mother all alone. What do I tell her?”
“You start preparing her. You tell her that you’ll be going away. You write her a series of letters telling her not to worry, and we’ll dole them out while you are over there.”
“But if something should happen to me . . . how will you know?”
“It’s my job to know.”
“Miss Chapman, I’m only going to do this if you promise me that if I don’t return, you’ll find out what happened to me. I can’t have my mother not knowing. I’m all she has left. If you promise me that, I’ll go.”
Chapman took the young woman’s hand into hers and said, “I promise, Marya.”
It was the first time in a week that Marya had been called by her real name, and hearing it reduced her to tears.
Paris, 1949
Walking down rue Saint-Honoré the next morning, Slim contemplated what it must have been like to be a hunted agent in occupied France. Would she have had the courage to put her life on the line like that? What made some people risk-takers and others not? What made Marie Claire, a.k.a. Marya Vyrubova, agree to something so dangerous?
On the fashionable Avenue Foch, she noticed a group of four people: two men and two women in a circle, dropping white roses in front of building number 84. Looking to be in about their mid to late thirties, they all turned around before Slim was within twenty feet, as if they all collectively sensed her coming. Four pairs of eyes glanced at her briefly, and then they went back to dropping white roses and reciting names.
“Diana Rowden, Yvonne Rudelatt, Roméo Sabourin . . .” With each name, a white rose was placed on the ground. Slim waited until they were done and then walked over.
“Hello, I’m—”
Before Slim could get any further in her introduction, a plump woman with an upper-class English accent cut her off.
“Chapman told us. You wish to ask us about Marie Claire, is that correct?” she said.
“I would,” Slim said. “Would that be OK?”
“Why don’t you join us for luncheon?” a man with an equally posh English accent smiled, making his almost whimsical handlebar mustache curl on the edges of his mouth.
“And some wine. We always have many toasts on this day,” the second man piped in. He was shorter, clean-shaven, and spoke English with a decidedly French accent.
The thin and drawn-looking woman standing slightly away from the other three glared at Slim and refused to take her hand when she offered it, making it clear that she didn’t want an outsider tagging along on this trip down memory lane. Slim decided it was best to ignore her and followed the four of them into a mud-brown Hotchkiss Grégoire.
“Quite an automobile,” Slim said, admiring the rarely seen vehicle as she squeezed in next to the woman who had refused her hand. Slim whispered, “Sorry.”
“I detest people who say sorry instead of excuse me,” the woman huffed with a noticeable French accent.
“Oh, Amelie, it wouldn’t kill you to be nice. Or maybe being mean kept you alive,” the handlebar mustache barked, setting off a spark of laughter which soon flamed out as the car drove by the pavement littered with white roses.
“Why didn’t you put the roses in a vase?” Slim asked.
“You mean standing upright neatly?” the British woman asked.
“Yes, there’s something so sad about white roses lying on the dirty pavement,” Slim replied.
“We see it as a metaphor,” the British woman explained. “We see our agents as roses cut down in their prime of life and trampled upon.”
The thin, humorless woman whom the mustachioed man had identified as Amelie caught Slim’s eye. There was something dead about her gaze. What those eyes must have seen, Slim thought, to appear so lifeless.
At the famed la Tour d’Argent, owner Claude Terrail greeted them, sporting a white carnation in his bespoke suit. He kissed each of the SOE members twice on the cheeks and then noticed Slim.
“Who are you?” he asked, surprised to see a stranger on this day of remembrance.
“I’m Slim Moran,” she said, offering only her name in fear that if she told him her purpose, he’d refuse her entry.
“Moran? Tyrone Moran’s daughter?”
“Yes.” Slim grinned.
“Those green eyes gave you away.”
It wasn’t the first time Slim had heard that. Jack Warner, of the Warner Brothers Studio, used to say that both she and her father had eyes the color of shamrocks.
The others turned and stared at Slim. Tyrone had been an international movie star in the thirties and forties. Now the group looked at her with that certain curiosity people seemed to exhibit with children of the famous.
“You are most welcome here, Miss Moran. Allez, mes amis, I have the table ready.”
Terrail led them through the sea of waiters in white tailcoats, who stepped back and slightly bowed as they passed through the packed room. Slim noticed that nearly all the guests including those she was with wore the Legion d’Honneur on their left breasts. They followed Terrail to the only remaining empty table, which looked out onto the Seine and Notre Dame. Slim took in her exquisitely laid place settings as the waiters began pouring champagne into their fluted glasses.
“Thank you for making room for me,” Slim said to Terrail.
“We set an extra place setting at each table in the hopes someone lost might return.”
“Monsieur Terrail, may I ask you something?” Slim asked.
“Mais oui, mademoiselle.”
“How did you earn your Legion d’Honneur?” She noticed he wore one on his jacket, like most of the others gracing the room.
“I wined and dined every high-ranking Nazi in Paris.”
“Doesn’t that make you a collaborator then?” Slim instantly regretted her question. Her table mates looked at her with shock, but Terrail laughed. “Mademoiselle, the more wine I gave the Germans, the more they talked, and the more they talked, the more I listened.” He winked at Slim, who blushed. “Now, enough about me. I have a surprise for everyone.”
He clapped his hands twice, and the French chanteuse Germaine Sablon burst through the doors and began to sing “Le Chant des Partisans.”
“Ami, entends-tu le vol noir des corbeaux sur nos plaines?”
To Slim’s amazement, everyone in the room stood with their glasses raised and began to sing.
“Ohé, partisans, ouvriers et paysans, c´est l´alarme. Ce soir l´ennemi connaîtra le prix du sang et des larmes.”
The song, rallying the French to rise up against the Nazis, was blunt in its intent: Get the knives, grenades, machine guns out of the straw, and kill the occupiers and sabotage their trains and factories. It was a song driven by hatred of the oppressors and craving the love of freedom.
At the final verse, someone shouted, “Vivre Jean Moulin!” the name of the martyred Resistance member who’d been sent by Charles de Gaulle to unite the various factions of the French Resistance. Betrayed by his own, he’d been tortured to death by the infamous SS sadist Klaus Barbie, who much to the anger of the French had escaped justice.
“Vivre S-O-E!” the plump woman next to Slim shouted, inspiring a roar from the crowd. Then they all sat down and began to introduce themselves to Slim. Handlebar mustache went first. “I am Dennis.”
“Just Dennis?” Slim asked.
“Since you only want to know about what happened between the years of 1942 to 1945, we’re only going to tell you our aliases. I was the circuit leader of the Invictus Network. It was my job to organize the French Resistance. Amelie.” The woman with the French accent nodded curtly. “And this was my saboteur, Michel.”
Michel gave her a quick smile and said, “Delighted.”
“And this is Bronwyn. She knew Marie Claire quite well. She trained her.”
The Englishwoman nodded. “Chapman said that she had hired you as a detective. So, what can we do for you?”
Two waiters came over and began to serve the first course, quenelle
s de brochet.
“Miss Chapman thinks Marie Claire is alive,” Slim said as she took her wide-pronged fork and pierced some of the poached fish.
“But that is impossible,” Michel blurted out. “Totally and utterly impossible.”
“She said that Marie Claire is sending messages in Morse code over the telephone.”
No one spoke for a moment, and then Bronwyn said, “What do these messages say?”
“They say, ‘You promised you would find me. Now keep your word.’” Slim saw the color drain from their faces.
“Was Marie Claire’s safety word used before the message was transmitted?” Bronwyn demanded.
“Apparently it was,” Slim replied as she took a sip of the buttery Sancerre.
“It’s not possible. Marie Claire cannot be alive. She cannot!” Amelie slammed her fist on the table. Dennis grabbed her hand to calm her.
“Enough,” Dennis said. “Once a year, I get to eat like this. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to enjoy this beautiful meal Monsieur Terrail has so graciously put in front of us. Let us dine like kings, and then we shall talk.” He picked up his utensils and tucked in.
They didn’t speak of anything of import until after the cheese course. When the aperitif was poured, Dennis nodded to his left. “So, Miss Moran, each of us has a story about Marie Claire to tell you. We will go in order.”
“I, for one, see no reason why I should tell you anything.” Amelie folded her arms and looked out the window.
“Miss Chapman said one of you betrayed Marie Claire,” Slim said.
“Ce n’est pas vrai!” Amelie spat furiously.
“We were all arrested. We all spent time being tortured.” Michel sighed with bitterness.
“Not me. I was lucky. But then again, I was sent to the Unoccupied Zone,” Bronwyn said.
“Is it possible that Marie Claire could still be alive?” Slim shifted the discussion. She had brought up the betrayal question to throw the lot off their game, and it appeared that she had succeeded.
“No, she cannot possibly be alive.” Michel folded his napkin.
The Lost Spy (Slim Moran Mysteries) Page 3
