Code Name Hélène

by Ariel Lawhon

  I let go altogether and slide under the surface. My hair floats around me in a dark cloud and I consider, for one terrible moment, that this wouldn’t be a bad way to go if it came to that. At least I’m warm. And clean. Who cares if a volcano chose this moment to rumble to life?

  This is what exhaustion does to me. I become maudlin. Bah! Get a grip on yourself, Nancy. What you need is a nap, not an early exit from what has been a perfectly exciting life.

  I push to the surface and grab a bit of pumice stone from a pile beside the bowl, and I go to work on my skin. First my hands and fingernails. All those places stained by gun grease and dirt. Elbows. Knees. The calluses along the outside of my big toes. Five more minutes, that’s all I give myself as I put the stone away and sit, eyes closed, feeling the water swirl around me, and then away as it moves on to wherever its natural course takes it.

  Both women watch me as I climb out of the bowl and begin wrestling wet, and now cold, items of clothing onto my body. I imagine I must look rather like a drowned rat. But I’m more tired now than I was when I arrived, and I know there is no chance whatsoever that I’ll be able to drive all the way back to Fournier’s encampment before I pass out. So I stumble out of the bathhouse and into the street.

  Two blocks down is a small inn with a vacancy sign dangling above the door. A couple hours of sleep, that’s all I need and I’ll feel better. It’s close enough that I don’t bother driving. Nor do I ask details about the rooms, other than which is available. The innkeeper takes my money, hands me a key, and points me to a room down the hall.

  The only thing I do before throwing myself at the bed is open the curtains, peel off my clothes once more, and set them in a patch of early-morning sun to dry. Then I pull a soft, pink nightgown from my pack and crawl into bed, thankful once more that at least I can sleep like a lady.

  * * *

  —

  I wake to the sound of gunfire. Rifles. My brain registers this before my eyes have opened. It sounds like a horde of irresponsible children have let off a bevy of fireworks. The air pops and crackles with the sound of it. And I think I’m getting out of bed. Or at least I’m trying to, willing my mind to move. But it isn’t until I hear the first artillery shell that I’m actually moving.

  Rip off the nightgown.

  Scramble for my clothes. They are no longer dripping, but they are still damp, so I’ve been asleep only a short while. Underwear. Bra. Camisole. Pants. Belt. Shirt. All of it clings to my skin and takes five times longer to situate than normal. Have you ever tried pulling on wet socks? Well, you may as well crawl back in the birth canal for all the good it does. I give up after a couple seconds and pull my boots on without them. Then I grab my pack and double-check that it still holds my money, carbine, and revolver. Cram my nightgown and socks inside and I’m out the door, down the hall, and hurtling into the street and toward my car two blocks away.

  As I run, I check the hills for signs of activity and am relieved to see that the smoke is coming from the direction opposite Fournier’s encampment. But the Germans are headed that way and I have to get there before they do.

  Lucienne Carlier

  MARSEILLE

  July 1942

  “I hate the Boche,” I tell Henri early one morning.

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “They’ve ruined everything!” I throw back the covers and take a deep breath of humid summer air.

  We sleep with the windows open now because we often wake to find that the ceiling fans have gone still in the night. The entire infrastructure of Marseille has collapsed in just two years. Unreliable electricity. Empty markets. Rationed gas. All the transport services have been run into the ground. The trams are broken. The taxis have been confiscated. The only thing that works are the trains, and they’re never on time.

  Henri pulls me closer beneath the blankets and drapes his leg over mine. I lie there for a moment longer, sweltering beneath him, until the dogs start whining to be let out.

  “I’ll get them,” Henri says, planting a kiss on my forehead. He slides out from under the covers, and I watch him move across the room. I have always loved his back. The muscles that run along his spine. The way he walks, hips low-slung and steady.

  “You’re staring again,” Henri says.

  “Can’t help myself.”

  “I’d be sad if you could.” He covers his naked body with his robe, then leads Picon and Grenadine out of our room and to the front door of the flat.

  The clever little things have long since learned how to go down the stairs, to the lobby, and out the mail slot in the side entrance. None of the other tenants seem to mind, and the arrangement saves us from having to walk them early in the day.

  Henri returns to bed several minutes later and curls around me once more. “Where will you be today?” he asks.

  I crane my head to look at his face. I search for a furrowed brow or pursed mouth and see neither. His expression is deceptively passive. “Toulouse.”

  “And who will you be today?”

  There is no hint of worry in his voice, but I know it’s there, regardless. For the last year and a half, I have been burrowing myself ever deeper in Resistance activities as he maintains the persona of an upstanding, impartial businessman. I have smuggled documents, radios, contraband, ration cards, and human beings from one end of the Free Zone to the other. I own three different identification cards. The real one, listing me as one Mme. Fiocca of Marseille; a second card—obtained from a loyal police official—also identifying me as Mme. Fiocca of Marseille, but conveniently omitting the fact that I am also a British subject, because nothing gets me stopped and questioned at a checkpoint more quickly than that bit of information; and a third, acquired with the help of Patrick O’Leary, that lists my name as Mlle. Lucienne Suzanne Carlier, the secretary to a French doctor.

  “Lucienne,” I say, and notice the briefest flicker of dismay in his eyes. This is the identity card I use when the work is particularly dangerous, when I need to keep Henri’s identity safe should I be arrested and interrogated. “I only hope Monsieur Carlier will not be too worried while I’m away.”

  Henri answers carefully, “Monsieur Carlier has long since realized that worry does him no good. It will not stop his wife from leaving, nor will it guarantee her safe return.”

  We do not often talk of my work, so this bit of honesty cuts deep. “Henri—”

  He sets one finger against my lips. “Monsieur Carlier prays instead. Constantly. For her safety.”

  I drop my cheek to his chest, relishing the feel of his silk robe against my skin. I listen to the strong thump of his heart beneath my ear and breathe in the scent so unique to him. He smells of clean sheets left to dry in the sun. Of brandy and citrus and pine. But something deeper as well, like he’s walked through a room filled with pipe smoke.

  He prays for me. What am I supposed to say to that? I have no idea. But I open my mouth and try to find something anyway.

  “Don’t,” Henri says. “I never wanted a tame wife.”

  “But did you want a reckless one?”

  “Are you being reckless?”

  I answer honestly. “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.” Henri cups my face with his free hand and turns it upward so that we are looking each other in the eye. “I want you exactly as you are. Brave and bawdy.”

  I laugh. “I think you like the bawdy part best.”

  He begins the process of showing me exactly how much he likes my bawdiness, but there is a scratch at the front door followed by Picon’s whine.

  “We’ve got to do something about their timing,” he mutters, sliding out from beneath the covers once more. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

  I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling as I listen to his bare feet pad across the wood floors. I have to be at the train station in two hours, so we have ple
nty of time to say a proper good-bye. I listen to the jiggle of the door handle and think of Henri’s large, wonderfully shaped hands. I think of what they are about to do.

  “Oh,” he says. “Hello.”

  Henri’s greeting is followed by a male voice speaking so low I can’t hear the words. I push onto my elbows.

  “She’s in bed,” Henri says.

  I catch only three words of the response: “…get her…important…”

  And then there is silence and I know Henri is standing at our door, arms crossed, face set in an expression of displeasure. It’s something he rarely shows me, but I’m not out there right now.

  After a moment of deliberation he says, “Come in. She’ll be out in a moment.”

  I’m already out of bed, getting dressed in yesterday’s clothes, by the time Henri walks back into our bedroom. He leans against the door frame and looks at me. “Watching you put those on is not nearly as fun as it was watching you take them off last night.”

  How do you tell your husband that you are sorry? That you’ll make it up to him? That you wish this war hadn’t swooped in and inhaled what should be the best years of your marriage? That you love him more than any other person alive and the only thing you really want to do is get back in bed and make love until you’re both so spent that you fall asleep again? That you want this more than anything but you are still going to answer the door when trouble comes calling? I certainly don’t know. I think Henri sees me struggle to find the words because he crosses the bedroom, moves my hair out of my face, and kisses me gently.

  “Patrick O’Leary needs you,” he says.

  “And you?” I ask, finally.

  “I am willing to share. For today.”

  O’Leary stands at our living room window, looking out over the harbor. His back is to us and he’s tugging at his ear. For a moment he looks like a small, lost boy and I find this both endearing and frightening. I’ve never seen him look scared.

  “O’Leary?”

  He turns, watching Henri cross the living room and switch on the radio. This is our routine, long established, whenever I have company. O’Leary does not comment on Henri’s robe or my disheveled appearance. Picon begins to whine again. He rises up on his hind feet and paws at Henri’s leg.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “Ian Garrow has been arrested by the Gestapo.”

  * * *

  —

  O’Leary walks me to the train station. Our heads are bent toward each other as we whisper. Anyone watching us would think we are friends, not lovers. And it is well known that Madame Fiocca has many friends.

  “Where is he?” I ask.

  “In Marseille. They are holding him at Fort Saint-Nicolas. For now.” O’Leary has the most unnerving gaze of anyone I’ve ever met. He never seems to blink when he looks at you.

  “For now?”

  “They are moving him to the Mauzac concentration camp in the Dordogne after he serves ninety days in solitary confinement.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I know a man at Fort Saint-Nicolas.”

  “A guard?” I ask, hopefully.

  “A cook.”

  “Any chance this cook owes you a favor?”

  “I’m afraid it’s the other way around.”

  “Hhhmm.” I think for a moment but come up with no easy solutions. I’ll have to figure out a way to contact Garrow once I’m done with this trip. “Where did they catch him?”

  He hesitates before saying, “At the checkpoint a block from the train station.”

  The very checkpoint that I’m headed toward now. The one I must go through, with my fake identification card, before traveling on to Nice to collect the Jewish wife of an Italian lawyer and their three young daughters, to whom I will provide identification cards stating they are Spanish citizens living in Gibraltar. I am not so much worried about the woman and her daughters as I am the five downed British pilots who will also be traveling with us back to Marseille and then on to Toulouse, where I will pass them all off to Françoise, who will get them to the Pyrenees and into Spain. In my experience, British soldiers always look like British soldiers no matter where they are in the world. It’s the mustaches, for one thing. But also the height and posture and the…the…straightness of them.

  “On what grounds did they arrest him?”

  “I think there is a double agent somewhere in our organization who tipped off the Gestapo and gave them a physical description of Garrow. So when he got off the train last night he was picked up immediately as a ‘person of interest.’ ”

  I take a quick breath through my nose and regret it immediately. The city has begun to smell like rotten fish in recent weeks. Most city services, including the formerly meticulous groundskeeping, have been halted. “Well, let’s hope they find me less interesting than Ian Garrow.”

  “Not likely.”

  He says this so matter-of-factly that I give him a curious glance. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means,” he says, “that my friend at Fort Saint-Nicolas says the Gestapo is also looking for a woman.”

  The train station is only three blocks away and the checkpoint only two. “What kind of woman?”

  “One known as la Souris Blanche.”

  “The White Mouse?”

  He smiles sadly. “A woman known for smuggling contraband and people through the country.”

  “Why the nickname?” I ask.

  “They know she exists but they cannot find her.”

  “And what else do they know about this white mouse?”

  O’Leary leans closer and his voice is a whisper in my ear. “That she laughs often, is a British subject, and is known in the city as l’Australienne de Marseille.”

  “Well, that’s unnerving.”

  “Yes, but it’s not all bad news right now.”

  “How so?”

  “Have you heard about the relève?” he asks.

  I nod. Last summer the Germans announced that they required three hundred and fifty thousand French workers to help man their industries. They want us to build the damn tanks and bombs they intend to kill us with.

  “And your president—”

  “—Pétain.” I spit the word.

  “Yes. Pétain. He has agreed to this.”

  “Traitor.” I shake my head. “He tried to soften the blow by arranging for one French prisoner of war to be released by the Nazis for every three workers who go to Germany voluntarily.”

  “But your countrymen are not responding to the call,” O’Leary says. “They are disappearing by the thousands. Slipping into the woods—the Auvergne, mostly—to live in small groups. They are forming an anti-Nazi outlaw group known as the Maquis. They intend to fight back.”

  “With what weapons? What leaders?”

  His shoulders twitch. “Whatever they can find, I suppose.”

  I think of Stephanie, her husband, and their desperate escape toward Switzerland. I think of Count Gonzales giving his final shipment of weapons to a Resistance group instead of the Nazis. I think…I hope…that maybe, perhaps, all is not lost.

  “We need to find out more about these groups. We need to help them if we can.”

  “Well, first we need to figure out what to do about Garrow,” he says.

  Patrick O’Leary drapes his arm across my shoulders and squeezes me to his side, once, firmly, before saying, “Be careful. Don’t trust anyone. I am told that one of the people searching for la Souris Blanche is a woman.” Then he falls out of step with me and turns a corner so quickly I don’t have time to tell him good-bye.

  I can see the checkpoint up ahead and I slow my breathing. I try to slow my heart rate as well but there’s nothing to be done about that. The trouble, I think, is that I don’t know how to not be me. I have never been
quiet or temperate or demure. But thanks to O’Leary, I now understand that being seen could be a very dangerous thing.

  I join the group of travelers moving through the checkpoint and do my best to keep my chin tipped down and my eyes focused on the middle distance. When my turn comes at the gate I hand my papers to the guard.

  He flips open the cover, looks at my name, and asks in passable French, “Mademoiselle Carlier?”

  “Oui.”

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Nice.”

  “For?”

  “Work.”

  He turns another page and runs his thumbs over the stamps. They are numerous. His eyes move on to me. My face. My chest. My waist. My shoes. “It says here you are a doctor’s secretary.”

  “Oui.”

  He extends his hand. “Your purse. It must be checked.”

  This is new, but I hand it over regardless. “Of course.”

  I watch as he rifles through my personal belongings. Lipstick. Sanitary pads. Coin purse. Hairbrush. Finding nothing, he hands it back as I take a small breath, letting my ribs expand against the four identification cards I carry between corset and skin.

  “I do wonder,” he says, “how it is that a secretary, one who no doubt makes a low wage, is able to travel as often as you do, mademoiselle?” His eyes return to my leather purse, the gold bracelet at my wrist, and then to the hem of my dress. “Not to mention that your clothing is quite fine for a woman of such modest means. What kind of secretary are you, exactly?”

  Merde. Putain. Merde. I’d say those words to him, and more as well, if I didn’t think it would land me in prison right beside Ian Garrow. I throw a quick glance behind me, then take a small step toward the guard, doing my best to manufacture a blush.