His expression was serious. “Then stop transmitting sooner. I could hear your tapping all the way down the corridor.” His Irish accent seemed stronger now, hard on the rs. “You’ll do none of us any good if you’re caught.” Then his brown eyes softened. “How are you?”
Bored and lonely and nervous living surrounded by Germans, she wanted to say. But it felt petty to complain. “What are you doing here?” she asked instead, as her fear receded. “I’m not scheduled to transmit again until Thursday.”
“I didn’t come to bring you a message.”
“Then what?”
“Julian needs your help.”
Her ears pricked. “To translate again?”
He shook his head. “Something different.”
Remembering her last failed mission for Julian with the bookseller, she was suddenly nervous. “What does he want?”
“Enough with the questions,” he said. “Come.”
Marie donned her coat and hat hurriedly, then picked up her purse. But she couldn’t resist one more question. “If Julian needs me, why didn’t he get me himself?”
“It wasn’t safe for him to come.” Not safe. Concern rose in her as she wondered what might have happened. As the leader of F Section, Julian was one of the most visible targets in northern France. There was little the Germans wouldn’t do to find him. The dangers outside loomed all the more real. Suddenly staying here and being bored didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.
Will led Marie down the front stairs to a Peugeot parked at the curb and held open the door. “Get in.”
On the street, the shops were closing for the night. The bookseller, drawing his shutters closed, looked up but did not acknowledge her. The café below her flat was just getting crowded, Germans clustering around the bar and tables. She hoped they would not notice her.
Will started the car and began to drive from the village without speaking. She studied him out of the corner of her eye. “Julian tells me you’re the air movements officer.”
He chuckled. “That’s a very big name for what I do.”
But really, she knew, his job was vast. He was the head of Moon Squadron, the ragtag bunch of pilots who, along with the RAF, made the drops into Occupied France. He controlled when the flights came and where they landed, who was on them and who left. And he handled virtually all of the mail that went between F Section and London. “My cousin exaggerates,” he added.
“Josie mentioned you’re related.”
“We were raised like brothers on Julian’s family farm in Cornwall,” he explained. “My mum was a single mother.” Like me, Marie thought, though she wasn’t ready to say as much to Will. “She left me with her sister for long stretches because she had to work. And she died of flu when I was eleven.” Will spoke easily, so unlike the tight-lipped manner in which the agents had been trained. “So Julian and I grew up together. And now we are all we have left.”
“You don’t have any family back home?”
Will shook his head. “I’ve always been alone. Julian’s kind of everyone’s and no one’s at all. He was married, though,” he offered, deflecting attention from himself. His face grew somber. “His wife and children were on a passenger ship, the Athenia, that was torpedoed by the Germans. There were no survivors.”
“Oh, goodness,” Marie said. She had no idea Julian was hiding such pain beneath his intensity and focus. She was amazed he was still living and walking at all. She thought of Tess with a giant pang in her heart. If anything happened to her daughter, she would not live to see the sun rise the next day.
“So it’s just him and me now, and I would do anything for him. Even though sometimes he’s dead wrong.”
“You mean about warning the locals?” she asked, recalling his disagreement with Julian the morning she’d arrived.
He nodded. “There are people who have risen from all corners of France to help us. The dry cleaner who uses his solvents to make false papers. An owner of a brothel on Rue Malebranche in Paris that hides us when no one else will. And the maquisards. These people will pay with their lives for what we are doing. They deserve to know what is to come so they can try to protect themselves and their families.”
He pulled up in front of the small rail station where she and Julian had fetched the bike the morning after she had arrived. “Delivering me again,” she mused.
Will smiled. “That seems to be my lot in life.” One day, perhaps, he would also deliver her home. The thought was too dear to speak aloud. “Your train will be coming in ten minutes.”
“My train?” She felt a nag of disappointment. When Will said Julian needed her, she thought that she would be seeing him and that they would be going somewhere together. “I don’t understand. Where am I headed? And where is Julian?”
“He will meet you after,” Will replied. After what? Marie wondered. But before she could ask, Will pulled out a piece of paper. “Memorize this address.” She read it: 273 Rue Hermel, Montmartre.
She turned to him in disbelief. “Montmartre?”
“Yes. Julian said to tell you it is time you saw Paris.”
* * *
Three hours later, Marie emerged from the metro station at Clignancourt and stepped out onto the steeply sloping Montmartre street. It was drizzling faintly and the damp pavement seemed to glow in the moonlight. The white dome of Sacré Cœur Basilica loomed overhead to the south, defiant and dazzling against the night sky. Dank smells rose from the sewers.
She had followed Will’s instructions and taken the night train into Gare du Nord, made her way from the rail station to the north Paris neighborhood, a tangle of narrow, winding cobblestone streets lined with bustling cafés and art galleries.
Go to the address she’d memorized, he said, and ask for Andreas; take the package he would give her and meet Julian at the Gare Saint-Lazare before the last train at eleven. “The package is absolutely critical to the mission,” he’d said. Then what on earth had made Julian send her, a radio operator with no experience as a courier who had been in-country all of a week? “The address you are looking for is a café and it will have a canary cage in the window. If there is no bird in the cage, that means it isn’t safe to approach.”
The address Will had given her was a sloping row house with a café on the ground floor. L’ambassadeur, read the gnarled wooden sign that jutted from the window beneath a striped awning. She searched for the birdcage but did not see it. Panic rose in her. An empty birdcage meant that it was not safe to enter, Will had said. He had not told her what to do if there was no birdcage at all.