by Lou Cadle
“Beatriz,” came Claude’s voice. “Wake up.”
“I’m awake,” she said, sitting up. The lantern light glowed brightly. She took off her jacket and brushed it and her trousers, removing grass and straw.
“Carry your valise,” he said. “And I’ll carry the radio inside that pack.”
She hesitated.
“I won’t leave your side. Unless I must, and then better I have it.”
He was offering to run the risk of being caught if they were spotted, with the radio. It was not necessary. And the radio was her responsibility. “Thank you, but I’ll bear my own burdens,” she said. And the risks.
“You are acting brave.”
“I hope I am brave.”
“You will know with certainty when the time comes.” There was a long silence. Not even the chickens moved. “Are you willing to do more than operate your radio?”
“Yes. Anything. Everything. I am trained.” She did not want to brag about her marks in training. He’d see she knew what she was doing, or she would fail and he would see that. And she herself was not certain that the real world of France would be anything like her training exercises. “Whatever needs to be done, I’ll do it. You need only ask.”
“Our numbers have shrunk. Some have moved elsewhere. A few grew nervous and quit helping us. A few new ones have joined, but I don’t use anyone new for—for sensitive matters until I know them well and trust them.”
She wondered if that would be true of her as well, or if by virtue of dropping from an English plane, she was more trustworthy to him. “Whatever you ask, I’ll do.”
“We also need you to stay alive to operate the radio.”
“I want that as well. Better I stay alive for the duration than they send yet another to risk her life.”
He made a noise, agreeing. “Each day we all hold each other’s lives in our hands. A radio is no burden for me to carry. Now let me tell you what I know of Monk circuit. It is compromised, as you know.”
“I did not know. I know little of the other circuits. Little enough of this one beyond your name and that you’ve been operating since the beginning.”
“Ah, well. Monk is destroyed. A courier told us three days ago. I will give you a list of names of agents who have been seen to be taken or have disappeared and are feared captured or dead.”
If very lucky, they could be in hiding, or climbing the mountains on the way to Spain. But it was more likely they were in the hands of the Gestapo.
“Here are their names. Do you need to write them? There are five. I have only code names.”
“I can manage to remember five.” After she had memorized the list of names to send back to England, she asked him, “Do you know how the circuit was compromised?”
“The courier suspects it was a betrayal in Paris. She will go there to meet with another, try to find out who is responsible and return with that information.”
Antonia hoped the courier would be careful. That was a task sounding more dangerous than Antonia’s own. “Do you want me to express this in any particular way?”
“The briefest way, naturally.”
Always good advice, for her own safety. Keep it brief, do it quickly, and leave anyplace where she’d transmitted a longer message as soon as possible. If she ended up transmitting and living in the same location, there were other rules to follow about when and how to transmit. “Are we staying in the countryside today or going into town?”
“The town. I have found somewhere for you to send your signal this once.”
“What do you need me to ask England for, for your missions? Supplies, people, intelligence?”
“Nothing today. If you must report something, say we have a sabotage operation planned for next week and the new detonators were appreciated.”
Detonators? So he had been out checking the supplies that had been dropped while she rested. “Then I’ll change into my secretary’s work clothes, if you don’t mind. I’d also like to encode the message I’m to send so when I can transmit, I’ll have it at hand.”
“Relieve yourself too, and turn off the lamp when you are done coding. I’ll wait for you on the road.”
Antonia stripped off her trousers in the lamplight and then stepped outside half-naked to urinate. No birds were calling yet. Not a hint of sunlight, but the air was frigid, the way it often was before dawn. The fog remained thick. Inside the barn, she dressed quickly, leaving on the heavy flat boots for now. Her dress shoes with their short heels would be harder to run in, but once she was around other people, she’d have to switch to those and tote the heavier boots in her bag. She needed to blend in.
She wondered if he had a safe place for her to stay or if she’d have to arrange for her own rooms. But each thing must be taken in its turn. First, radio England. Next, she should find a place to spend the day or a permanent residence. Finally, listen to whatever plans Claude had for the circuit’s coming work. A mission, he had said, and she could be part of it.
The folded square of silk from the Codemaster’s supply was in a buttoned inside skirt pocket with the code keys printed on it in tiny rows of letters. She took that out, retrieved a short pencil and scrap of paper, and she sat in front of the lamp and wrote a message that said “arrived” and the news about Monk circuit. She had to think for a moment to get one of her misspelled words into the message. She double-coded the words, leaving only the five-letter groups she would transmit, letters that would be nonsense to anyone but the person with the exact same key code. It wouldn’t take but five minutes to send this, ten minutes to send it twice. She tucked the final message into a zipper pocket on her jacket.
Withdrawing her sleeve knife, she carefully slit the used code off the silk, giving her a tiny sliver of material, not a quarter-inch wide, bearing only the string of nonsense letters and numbers. Using her knife tip, she dangled it into the lamp flame, and it caught fire. Silk did not burn easily, as she had been warned. She had to hold it there for long seconds. The smell of burned hair came from the flame. Finally, the last bit had been turned to ash. She waved her knife in the air to cool it, then replaced it in its sheath.
After making sure she had left nothing behind or dropped nothing on the floor, that her knife and unused silk and encoded message were in their places, and touching her L-pill locket, she set her valise by the door. Her radio she put into the empty pack and slung it over a shoulder. When she had turned off the lamp, she left. Still no sign of the sun rising, but a distant bird sang a sleepy tune. Dawn would soon come. It was time to move on.
Chapter 5
Claude awaited her at the far side of the barn. “This way.”
They walked along an empty road, leaving the bikes behind, and marching in silence for more than thirty minutes. As dawn began to cast the first gray light around, she saw blurred shapes of houses ahead, not terribly close to each other. The edge of a town, the fog rendering it in impressionistic tones. He turned right down a small street, an alleyway really, and they went a long way up it, and then turned left on a footpath that led to stairs going up. The houses were closer together here. Halfway up the stairs, he stopped abruptly and knocked softly on a door: two taps, a pause, then one more tap.
The door opened with a creak, revealing a small parlor, empty of all but two chairs and a table. When the door closed, Claude said, “You should oil that door.”
“No one else does,” said a middle-aged man, leaning heavily on a cane. “I don’t want to stand out.”
“No one will notice the absence of a sound,” Claude said. “We need to go upstairs.”
Antonia saw he would not introduce her. It was for the best, she knew, but her curiosity was piqued. Was this a cell member she’d meet later? Another relative of Claude’s? A sympathizer? She might never know.
Claude took her to a flight of stairs. “The door to your left. Be quick. I’ll wait at the main door.”
She went up the stairs, wondering if there were others here, sleeping perhaps in other rooms.
A wife, a child?
The room had one window set too high for her to be seen from the street, but it let in the light of dawn, enough for her to set up the radio. She opened the case and took out the antenna, fold by fold, and strung it around the room. It was over three times her height. A curtain hung on the window, and she nudged it aside a fraction to peer out. Another house faced her, but no light shone, and she saw no movement behind the curtains. She let the end of the antenna rest between the curtains on the window ledge.
She set the radio on the floor, turned it on, and retrieved her message from her pocket while the radio warmed up. She felt something akin to stage fright. Her first real message. She’d keyed hundreds upon hundreds in practice. But this was a new experience.
The radio was ready, so she took up the transmitting key, sat on the floor—a stable surface was best, and there was no table or desk in here—and sent the message. She might have made a mistake in the first, so she was happy it was short enough she had the time to resend it. The second time, she was sure she had gotten it right.
There was a box of matches in the radio case. She took one out, burned the paper that had the coded message on it, and ground the ashes into the wooden floor with her boot. The antenna took a bit more effort to repack correctly than she liked, but in total, she wasn’t in the room more than twenty minutes. She had only been broadcasting for half that time.
She came down the stairs. The stranger was gone, but she could hear him in the kitchen, making his breakfast. Without a word, Claude opened the front door, peered out, and then motioned her to follow him outside.
They moved through the cold farther into town, coming alive with pedestrians, and he led her to a cathedral. More Impressionism, a cathedral blurred in the fog. “Go pray,” he said. “I’ll be back within an hour.”
She was glad she had been in churches, to masses. Her parents raised her without religion, but her mother’s sister had been religious and had taken her not only to church but to French cathedrals much like this one, so she was confident she wouldn’t make any glaring mistakes in there.
It was small, as cathedrals went. But the lines of the building inside were pleasing. In lamplight, a few working women apparently on their way to jobs like cleaning and cooking were here, one lighting a candle and two sitting. Antonia knelt, crossed herself, and took a seat.
Her radio she kept between her feet, her valise to the side of her on the pew. She glanced around, and no one seemed to be watching her, so surreptitiously, she pulled out her low pumps from her valise and traded her boots for them. She was stuffing the boots into the valise when she heard the door open behind her. Ignoring the valise for the moment, she bowed her head and pretended to pray.
A booted man walked up the aisle, stopped briefly at her row, and went on. Peering up, she saw a German uniform. Her heart leapt into her throat, and her hands clasped each other harder, seemingly of their own accord. Had the Germans detected the radio signal? Were they looking for a suspicious stranger—for her?
An animal urge to run was hard to ignore, but she forced it down and kept an eye on the German. Except for photographs, she hadn’t ever seen a Nazi. Uniformed Falange members back in Spain, yes, but this was her first personal sighting of a Nazi. And there he was, just a man, in three dimensions rather than in the two dimensions of photographs. Not particularly tall. No horns, no cloven hooves. A young man with a straight back. He stopped and glanced at another of the women, as he had apparently done to Antonia, and he moved forward.
Should she slip out?
No. Claude wouldn’t know where to find her if she did. And if she ran, and the soldier wasn’t looking for her, she’d simply draw his attention. The chances they’d detected her brief signal were small, and even if they had, why would they look here for her? That was only the fear talking. So she sat and did not pray, but she wished hard that he would leave.
He stopped, knelt briefly, crossed himself, and slipped into a pew, two rows behind that second woman.
He was only here to pray? She hadn’t thought about there being Catholic Germans, but of course there must be.
As quietly as possible, she finished packing away her boots. She considered shoving her radio under the seats ahead, but there was no reason to.
The Nazi leaned forward and spoke to the young woman two rows ahead of him. Antonia felt a shiver of fear on the woman’s behalf, but the woman nodded at whatever he had said. Was she an informant? The German stood and sidled out of the pew, stopping again to genuflect, a perfunctory dip.
Antonia bowed her head as he approached, feeling the radio between her feet as a thing of incredible mass, vibrating out its presence. But if it did send out some invisible call to its enemies, he didn’t feel it, for the Nazi passed her without stopping.
Five minutes later the woman he had spoken to rose, went to where he’d been sitting, and picked up something. A note? Money? Her movements suggested it wasn’t heavy. Antonia tried to memorize her face. She’d avoid her, in case she was an informant. But as the woman drew nearer her, she saw that it was barely more than a girl. Maybe the two of them were lovers, collaborators in a different sense than it had first seemed.
Not that this made the girl trustworthy. No—secrets shared at night between lovers could bring down the Cooper circuit as easily as an agent’s confession under torture. When the girl passed her, Antonia kept her eyes fixed on the crucifix at the front of the church. As the girl’s footsteps faded, Antonia’s thoughts turned to what she was looking at, the drooping figure with the crown of thorns. Jesus had suffered for the world’s sins, they said, but today, all over the world—in Europe, in China, in Africa, in Japan, and on tiny islands she’d never heard of before two years ago when they’d begun to appear in the newspaper stories—the world was sinning and suffering as it never had in two thousand years, in greater numbers, with more awful weapons amplifying the suffering. Hardly a person around the globe was left untouched by it.
People would never learn. The cruelty, the sadness of that was almost too much to bear, and the poor man up there on the cross seemed to her to have suffered for nothing.
After another ten minutes had passed, the girl Genevieve appeared in the aisle and whispered to her, “Auntie, Mama needs you.”
Antonia gathered up her things and left the cathedral, the blonde girl already moving along the street and soon drawing ahead of her. The dress shoes were a tiny bit loose, and she’d wear blisters if she didn’t attend to that soon. They reached a street of cobblestones and her heels clicked on it. Genevieve was wearing soft-soled shoes and moved more quietly.
Genevieve made another turn and went a block and a half to a shop with a sign. She looked both ways, and then pushed in, setting off the faint tinkling of a bell. Antonia caught up and entered behind her.
It was a boulangerie. Its main display case was nearly empty. A few round buns sat apart from each other, and a half-dozen baguettes of too dark a brown. Wheat flour, or some additive like sawdust, or worse?
“On vit mal,” said the clerk who stood behind the case, seeing something in Antonia’s expression, perhaps the remaining sorrow she’d felt in the church, or perhaps the larger sorrow behind it. “Life is hard,” it meant. Indeed it was. The clerk indicated the empty shelves, so perhaps it was meant only as an apology for her scant goods. A woman in her sixties, blonde but going gray, her hair held up in a bun, she was still beautiful. Or perhaps not beautiful still, but the beauty she’d once owned was clear to Antonia’s eyes, despite a sagging chin and lines around her eyes, despite a bosom sunken and drooping beneath her white jacket.
“Is it difficult to get flour?” she asked the clerk.
“Get to the back room,” Genevieve said, impatient.
Antonia headed where Genevieve pointed, beyond a curtained doorway, lugging her valise and radio.
A moment later, the clerk joined them. “Long live De Gaulle,” she said.
“Long live France,” Antonia said, without missing a beat
. The SOE was not fond of De Gaulle, but of course that would not hold here, with the occupation. She adjusted her attitude.
“Yes, yes, but she must be hidden now,” Genevieve said.
The clerk nodded but did not move to obey. “I am Madame Charlevoix. Welcome to my shop. No need to tell me your name. I know how you sort are about that. I have a room for you. It isn’t much, but you can stay here as long as you need.”
“It’s everything,” Antonia said. A safe space to sleep for a time? It was a gift beyond any she deserved from this stranger.
The bell out front rang again. Genevieve held her finger to her mouth and glared at Antonia, her look as clear as words: “You should have hidden yourself sooner.”
Antonia wasn’t all that worried about the customer on the other side of the curtain until Madame Charlevoix began to speak German. Antonia attended to the words, but she knew very little German and recognized nothing except for the greeting. The old woman slipped back behind the curtain, a thin paper bag and tongs in her hand, and opened a wooden box with a sloped lid. She flipped the bag open with a practiced gesture and, using the tongs, pulled out four pastries. These had an egg glaze, and Antonia could smell the sugar in them. The odor made her stomach twist in hunger.
A moment later, the bell rang again and Madame Charlevoix slipped back through the curtain, saying, “He is well gone. Let’s get you settled.”
Genevieve said, “Stay out of sight. I will come back, or another will, within the day.” And she hurried away, the bell tinkling again as she left.
“She always was such a mannish child,” said the old woman.
“You’ve known her long?”
“You should know better than to ask questions,” she replied.
“I do know better. I am deeply sorry.”
She waved it off. “The little one is my father’s cousin’s child. But it is not that large a city, and I have family ties to many people.”
“He must be worried about her, her father.”
“He is dead, more than two years. He defied the occupiers. Come.” She led Antonia to a narrow set of stairs, took up a cane with her but did not need to use it in getting up the stairs. “And now,” she said, and she pointed to a door on hinges overhead in the hallway of the uppermost story. There was no rope dangling to pull it open, just a handle that was out of Antonia’s reach.
