“What is it?”
“Wireless transmissions. Some interoffice documents and telegrams, too. But it doesn’t look like it belongs in this box with the personnel files. Someone must have packed it there by mistake.” Grace reached for the file, wondering if it would shed some more light on the girls in the photos. She noticed that several of the documents had been issued on the same letterhead: “From the Desk of the Recruitment and Logistics Officer, E. Trigg.”
Eleanor wasn’t just a secretary. She was running things.
There was a clattering at the door to the archive. Grace turned to see Raquel in the doorway. “Raquel,” Mark said. “We weren’t expecting you back so soon.” They could not have been in the archive for more than fifteen minutes.
“I saw Brian walking across the parking lot,” Raquel stammered. The archivist must have come back from lunch early. “Come quickly.” She led them out a back doorway and up a different flight of stairs. A few minutes later, she let them out onto a loading dock. “I’ll phone you a cab. I never should have let you in here. I could lose my job.”
“Thank you,” Mark began, putting his hat on once more. “Tell Tony...” But Raquel had closed the door and was already gone.
“I’m sorry that wasn’t more helpful,” Mark said a few minutes later when they were seated in the cab. “A whole trip to DC for a few minutes in the archives. We could have used hours in there.”
“Agreed. But at least we have this.” She reached in her coat and pulled out the narrow file containing the wireless transmissions.
He stared, stunned by her audacity. “You took it.”
“Borrowed, let us say. I didn’t mean to. I was just startled when Raquel came back early, and I did it before I could think.” Just like with the photos in the station. Hadn’t she created enough of a mess by taking something that wasn’t hers already? “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have.” It was his friend who had given her access to the files and she hoped he wouldn’t be mad.
But he smiled. “That was nervy. I’m impressed. Can I see?” He moved closer across the seat. She handed the file to him. He skipped the first few sheets, which he had seen when they were in the archives. “Eleanor’s name is all over these papers,” he remarked. “It seems like she was in charge, or pretty close to it.”
“Not at all the clerk that the consul had described her to be,” Grace replied. She wondered what else Sir Meacham might have been wrong—or lied—about. “But I still wonder about the girls in the photos. If there were no files on them, could they still have been agents, too?”
Mark pulled out two papers that were stapled together, scanning them. “This is a full list of all of the female agents, or at least it seems to be.”
“Are the girls in the photos on there?”
He nodded and pointed to one of the familiar names, Eileen Nearne, then another, Josie Watkins. They had surnames now, had become whole people. “So they were on the list, but there were no personnel files for them,” she mused. “I wonder what that means.” There was a little notation next to about a dozen of the names—the same ones that were on the photos: NN.
“What does that stand for?”
Mark flipped over to the second page where there was a small legend. “‘Nacht und Nebel,’” he read. “Night and Fog.”
“But what does it mean?”
“It was a German program, designed to make people quite literally disappear.” He closed the file. Then he turned to Grace, his expression somber. “I’m sorry, Gracie,” he said gently, putting his arm around her shoulder. “But it means that all of the girls in the photos are dead.”
Chapter Thirteen
Eleanor
London, 1944
The first thing that should have tipped Eleanor off was the lack of mistakes.
She was alone in her office at Norgeby House, flipping through the roller deck of cards again and again like some movie she had seen a thousand times. Each three-by-five index card contained details for one of the girls, her background, strengths and liabilities, last known whereabouts. She didn’t need to read them; she knew them all by heart. Her complete recall was not something she tried to do. Rather, once she saw a detail about an agent or a bit of news from France, it was seared indelibly on her brain.
Eleanor rubbed her eyes, then looked up around the office. It was a generous term for the windowless former broom closet. It was the only spot available, the clerk had claimed when she had turned up at the administrative office at headquarters with the note from the Director requisitioning a place for her unit. Though Eleanor doubted this was true, she had no way to prove it and she took the space in the cellar, which was scarcely big enough to hold a desk. The air was so heavy with the smell of cleanser, it somedays threatened to overpower her. But the location was good, close to the radio room where transmissions were sent and received. The endless clacking of the teletype in the background was a now-familiar lullaby, one she was destined to hear even in her dreams.
Or would be, if she ever slept. Eleanor had practically lived in the office at Norgeby House in the months since she had started sending girls into the field, only going home briefly every few days to change clothes and reassure her mother that she was fine. Belle Tottenberg, who had changed her surname to Trigg upon arrival from Pinsk nearly twenty-five years earlier in order to fit in with the English circles she aspired to join, had never approved of what she referred to as her daughter’s “boring little office job.” If Eleanor had to work, she’d often said, it might as well be at Harrods or Selfridges. Eleanor had considered more than once telling her about the girls she recruited and the way they reminded her of Tatiana. But even if she could share such matters, Eleanor knew the meaning would be lost on her mother, who had buried her grief in a whirlwind of teas and plays, putting behind her the dark years that Eleanor herself could never seem to outrun.
Eleanor remained at Norgeby House nearly around the clock by choice, catching short naps at her desk in between the times when transmissions were scheduled and they were expecting messages from the field. She didn’t have to stay; the wireless transmissions, which almost always came at night, would have been sorted and decoded and delivered to her in the morning. But she liked to study the messages as they came in to recognize the patterns in the text and ways the girls transmitted. By receiving the messages in real time, it felt almost like the girls were speaking to her directly.
Eleanor stood up from her desk and started toward the radio room. In the hallway, two uniformed men were talking in low voices. They averted their eyes as she passed. The male officers who had voiced such skepticism about her heading up the women’s sector had not warmed to her. There was a hesitation when she entered the room for the morning briefing now, an almost whisper. As long as they didn’t interfere with her doing her job and looking out for her girls, Eleanor didn’t care.