The Lost Girls of Paris

by Pam Jenoff

  Walking into the annex, her heart sank. There, sitting on the table, was her radio.

  But as she walked closer, she saw that this was not the radio they had confiscated from her flat; the markings on the case were different. She wondered whose it was, and how long they’d had it. The Germans had been broadcasting to London, acting as one of their own—and London believed it. It all came together then—how the Germans had impersonated the agents and fooled London into sharing critical information. The radio, which had been their lifeline, had also now proved their undoing.

  “But you already have the radio,” she managed. “What do you want from me?”

  “We need you to talk to London to authenticate the messages.” There must be something about their transmissions, Marie realized, and they wanted her to validate them. Julian couldn’t have done it, even if he was willing. She understood then they needed her. If she helped them, she might save her life—and Julian’s. But if she refused and London realized that something was amiss, she might put an end to the radio game once and for all.

  She saw Josie’s face in the sky above her, foreboding, beseeching her to be strong. She saw Eleanor, who would expect better. “No,” she said aloud. She would not do it.

  Kriegler walked around the front of the desk and stood before her. Without speaking, he slapped her across the mouth so hard she was lifted from the chair. She fell backward and clattered to the floor, her head slamming against the ground. The teacup shattered, spraying hot liquid and shards of porcelain everywhere.

  But what Kriegler did not know was that it was not the first time in Marie’s life she had been hit. Marie’s father had been a violent drunk. When he’d come home from the pub, Marie or her mother, whoever was closest, were the collateral damage of his rage. Blows and fists; once he’d slammed her head into the wall. She’d escaped her father’s wrath; he hadn’t defeated her, and she wasn’t going to let Kriegler defeat her now.

  So as Marie lay on the floor of the office of Avenue Foch, seeing her father in this monster standing before her, something inside her hardened. Kriegler was going to have to kill her—because she would never talk.

  Kriegler reached down and, with unexpected civility, helped her back into the chair. Warm wetness bubbled at her lip where it had split.

  When she looked up, Kriegler was holding a list, which he passed to her. She turned away, but he pushed it forcibly, the paper scraping against her face. Finally she could avoid it no longer. The paper contained not just scraps of information but what appeared to be a list of every single agent in the region, their aliases and their actual names. They had the names of all of their French contacts, too, and their addresses. The safe houses and the storehouses where munitions and so much else were hidden.

  She stared at the paper. Someone had given them up; Julian had confirmed that moments earlier. But the scope of the betrayal, before her on this paper, was staggering. Who among them could have possibly been such a traitor?

  “We have everything,” Kriegler said smugly.

  “Then I suppose,” she said, lifting her chin defiantly, “you don’t need me.”

  Kriegler’s open palm slammed into her again. She fell to the floor and when he lifted her this time, it was by the hair. The blows rained down quicker now, one after the other. For the first time in her life, she prayed for death to come quickly. She saw Tess’s face in her mind and locked on it, transporting herself from this horrible place. She held her breath and counted, willing herself not to scream.

  Kriegler suddenly stopped. Just as abruptly as it had started, the beating was over. She tried to see through her swollen eyes, to breathe and brace herself for whatever was coming next.

  A door opened and shut again. A guard threw Julian into the annex and he fell to the floor, too weak and beaten to stand.

  Seeing her mangled face, he let out an anguished cry. She sat up and tried to go to him. Kriegler stepped between them and put the gun to Julian’s head. “Do it or he dies.” His eyes were steely, no sign of life behind them. She knew he would kill Julian without a shred of hesitation.

  “Marie, don’t...” Julian pleaded.

  Marie faltered; her own life was one thing, but Julian was their leader and she had to make sure nothing happened to him. This was not about her feelings for him. The survival of the Vesper circuit, or whatever remained of it, depended on him. “All right,” she said finally. She spat away the blood that had pooled in her mouth. “I’ll do it.” It was against everything she had learned and trained for—but she would do it to save his life.

  The guard wrenched her from Julian and dragged her over to the machine. She started to reach for the radio, but Kriegler shooed her away and set up the transmission himself, as expertly as any operator who had trained with her at Arisaig House.

  Kriegler pulled out her box of worked-out keys, which they had confiscated from her upon arrest. “Send a message, letting them know that it is you and that everything is fine. Then send this.” He handed her a message and a slip of silk bearing one of the ciphers. The message was requesting another drop of supplies to a specific location. If she did as Kriegler was demanding, the ruse would go on and on. SOE would keep sending agents and arms right into the waiting hands of the Germans.

  Marie transcribed the message into code, then found her frequency with shaking hands. She finished the message and showed it to Kriegler. “Your security check,” Kriegler said. He jammed the gun into the wound beneath Julian’s jaw, and Julian grunted to keep from crying out in pain. “What is it?” Kriegler demanded.

  Marie hesitated. If she gave up the information too easily, Kriegler would know it was a bluff. “Changing the thirty-fifth letter of the message to p,” she explained slowly, pointing. “I did it right there.” She didn’t mention the second check, the one she had left out. She prayed he did not know about it and would not notice.

  “Send it,” he growled. Back in London, Eleanor would be reading the message. Surely she would notice the absence of the second security check and realize that something was amiss.

  A message came back over the line and she wrote it down. As she decoded it with the silk, her terror grew. It was the one she most dreaded, the one she never thought they would send:

  “True check missing.”

  As she decoded the message, Marie stiffened with dread. The operator in London had just told Kriegler that Marie had tried to dupe him. But that was exactly what the second check was supposed to convey, that something was amiss with the transmission. How could the operator back in London not know that? Marie was flooded with despair. Behind her, she could sense Kriegler’s growing rage. “Wait, I...” She turned toward him, trying to find an explanation.

  He grabbed her by the nape of her neck, pulling at her hair until her scalp screamed. Then, just as abruptly, he let her go. “Your second check,” Kriegler hissed, cocking his revolver against Julian’s head.

  “Marie, don’t do it!” Julian cried out. “They’ll kill us anyway.”

  But she had lost him once; she could not bear to lose him again, this time for good. “K instead of c,” she blurted desperately. “Every other time.” Now the Germans had exactly what they needed to transmit as her without detection.

  “Fix it!” Kriegler ordered. She recoded the message and sent it again.

  The response came and she used the worked-out key to decode it hurriedly: “Check verified. Information forthcoming.”

  “There...” she began, turning back toward Kriegler. His gun was pointed at her now. She saw Tess’s face hovering above her, said farewell as she prepared to die.

  “You should have helped us the first time.” He swung his arm sideways toward Julian.

  “Don’t!”

  It was too late. A shot rang out. Julian jerked, then slumped onto the floor.

  “No!” she screamed, running toward him.

  She knelt wh
ere he had fallen and took him in her arms. Kriegler had fired with deadly accuracy. The bullet had entered between Julian’s temple and cheekbone, lodged somewhere. The rational part of her knew that there was no way he could survive such a wound. But in her heart, she could not believe it. “Hold on, Julian,” she pleaded. His eyes were still open. But they drifted upward, the light fading from them.

  “I love you,” he breathed. There it was, the feelings between them realized at last. Or perhaps he simply thought she was Reba, his wife. But he grabbed her arm. “We should have been together, Marie.” She heard in his words all that might have been between them if things had been different. “I love you,” he repeated.

  “And I, you,” she said, holding him close. There was no denying what was between them anymore. She kissed him again, for what she knew would be the last time.

  His body went slack then and she pulled away. “I see them,” he whispered. He had almost no voice left at all. “My wife and boys.” His hand reached out to the invisible image in front of him.

  “Don’t leave me,” she begged, selfish where she should have been strong. She did not know how she could face whatever would come next without him. “This is not the end.” She remembered what he had once said about scores of others rising up to take their place. She saw it now in the light behind his eyes. He grimaced and then his face relaxed, the calmest she had ever seen him. His breathing stilled. She buried her face in his chest.

  And then he was gone.

  She set his head down gently. “Why?” she screamed, lunging at Kriegler. She gouged his face with her nails.

  “Bitch!” he swore, raising his hand to where she had drawn blood. He gestured for the guard to take her.

  “We did what you wanted!” she screamed, unhinged now as the guard dragged her from the room. “We did what you asked. We are prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. You cannot do this!”

  “Prisoners of war?” he laughed with contempt. “Fräulein, where you are going, you don’t even exist.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Eleanor

  London, 1944

  Eleanor sat at her desk in Norgeby House, poring over the old transmissions.

  She was still reeling over the awful truth about the radio being compromised. There was still no word about Julian or Marie. She studied the past messages from Vesper circuit, looking for more signs of the breach and trying to assess the damage that might have been done. How could she have let this happen? Protecting the girls was everything, her life’s work. Yet she had failed them, just as surely as she had failed her sister decades earlier.

  Rubbing her eyes, she stood and walked into the radio room. The operators were sitting more quietly than usual, the clacking of a lone wireless set the only sound.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked Jane. The question was a foolish one; Jane had taken the compromise of Marie’s radio every bit as hard as Eleanor herself. The girl looked pale and drawn from the long hours of waiting and worrying since the false transmission that purported to be from Marie.

  Jane shook her head. “Margaret didn’t broadcast as scheduled.”

  “Nor has Maureen,” another operator chimed in.

  “Perhaps there’s a problem with the transmissions,” she said, wanting to comfort them. But the words hung hollow in the air. Something larger was amiss.

  Eleanor started down the street for the Director’s office, bypassing his secretary and not bothering to knock. “Sir?”

  The Director raised his eyebrows. “Trigg? Come in. I was just about to come see you.” This seemed odd when he had not summoned her; in fact, he had not expected her at all.

  “Two more radios have gone silent.”

  He pursed his lips beneath his moustache, but did not seem surprised. “There have been rumors of more arrests outside Paris.” Eleanor’s stomach twisted. “Two agents taken at a safe house outside Paris. Others to the east and south.”

  It was not just the destruction of the bridge that had set off the wave of arrests, she knew. Although the detonations had set off the round of reprisals that had come swiftly in its wake, it was more than that. Kriegler and the SD seemed to suddenly know all too well where to find the agents they were seeking. They must have been playing along for months, Eleanor suspected, letting the agents operate as long as the radio ruse had worked. Once they knew that they had been detected, the Germans had nothing more to lose. They had taken the gloves off, acted on the intelligence that they had amassed and began a dragnet to catch all of the agents. Though there had been no word of Marie or Julian, it seemed inevitable that they had been taken as well.

  “Were the arrested agents men or women?” she asked.

  “Maybe both,” the Director replied. “I don’t have the names yet.” With sinking dread, Eleanor felt certain that Margaret and Maureen would be among them.

  “Sir, we have to do something.” They had sent word to all of the circuits in France, telling them to go to ground. It wasn’t enough. The agents should have been recalled; Eleanor had demanded it. But it was just days before the invasion, and they were not about to start a mass evacuation that would raise questions.

  “We are going to do something.” He paused. “We’re bringing them home as you suggested.” Things must be very bad if they were actually going through with the withdrawal of agents. “Orders to extract those that remain have already been sent.” Eleanor felt as though she had been slapped. Why hadn’t those orders been sent through her? “It will take a bit longer than we hoped,” he added.

  “How long?” she demanded. Another week and there might not be any agents left at all.

  “I don’t know. Will Rourke, the pilot who organized Moon Squadron, has gone missing. There’s word of a plane shot down over Brittany, which might be his. But we’ll get them home as quickly as possible.”

  Relief flooded Eleanor, quickly replaced by confusion. “All of the agents?”

  He shook his head. “Just the girls. They’re shutting you down.” You, she noticed. Not us. “I’m afraid they’re writing off the women’s unit as a failed experiment.”

  Failed experiment. Eleanor seethed at the words. The girls had done great things, accomplished their missions, done everything that was asked of them. No, the failure was not the girls, or even the agents, but headquarters.

  Eleanor’s brain screamed with disbelief. “But the invasion is just days away. Surely our work there is more important than ever.”

  “The circuits are being regrouped, in some cases eliminated. The work will be done by the men.”

  “Have you accounted for all of them?” she asked, already knowing the answer. “The girls, I mean.”

  “All but twelve.” The number was so much larger than she had anticipated. He handed her a piece of paper with the names. Josie was on it, Marie, too. Twelve of her girls were still missing.

  And it was in no small part her own fault. Bringing women into F Section had been her idea in the first place. Eleanor had recruited those girls, overseen their training and personally deployed them to Occupied Europe. And she had seen that there were problems, yet failed to insist that more be done. No, she alone was responsible for those who went missing and would never return.

  “There are men missing, too,” he pointed out.

  “Yes, of course.” Eleanor swatted at the argument she had heard a dozen times. “But the men have commissions. And they are to be treated as POWs if captured.” It was not that she didn’t care about the men. But they had army titles, ranks—and the protections of the Geneva Convention. The government would look for them. Remember them. Not her girls.

  “I have to go see for myself what went wrong on the ground.”

  “You mean to find the girls? I’m afraid that is quite impossible.”

  “But, sir, a dozen are still missing,” she protested. “We can’t simply give up.�
�

  He lowered his voice. “Eleanor, you must stop asking about the girls. There will be repercussions for yourself and for others. You have much to lose right now. And if not for yourself, you have to let it go for the families of the girls. You know as well as I do that if the Germans have caught them, they are likely gone. Your questions will only bring their families more pain.”

  The Director picked up his pipe. “The investigation is classified, and being handled at the highest levels.” That, Eleanor knew, was a lie. If anyone at all was looking for the girls, they would have come and spoken to her. No, the matter had been shelved at the highest levels. “There is simply no need for you to know,” he added, before she could call him on it.

  “No need?” Her voice was incredulous. They were her girls. She had recruited them, sent them over. “So you’re ordering me to stop looking for them?” she asked with disbelief.

  “It’s more than that. The women’s unit has ended. Your position has been eliminated.”

  “I’m being transferred then? Where am I to go?”

  He looked away, not meeting her eyes. “I’m afraid we’ve been ordered to downsize.” He spoke stiffly now, as if reading words from a document he had not himself written. “We are grateful for your service, but I regret to inform you that your tenure at SOE has ended.”

  She stared at him blankly. “Surely this is a mistake.” She had been with SOE for months—no, years—before the women’s unit was founded. They could not be getting rid of her now.

  “We have no choice. You’ve been given thirty minutes to gather your personal belongings.” She searched for words, found none. Her insides burned white-hot with anger. She stood and fled his office, starting back down the stairs to Norgeby House.

  Eleanor went to her desk and started stacking files, pulling the photos of the girls who were missing and slipping them into her bag. She knew she did not have much time. A moment later, the Director appeared in the doorway. “I’ll see you out,” he said. She reached for another file, but he stilled her hand. “Leave everything as it is.” She understood then why he had followed her. “You’re to take your personal belongings only. No papers,” he added, seeming to know before she did herself that she would not stop looking for the girls. A plan began to form in her mind.