Neither of them spoke further. Several minutes passed, broken by the quiet ticking of a clock on his nightstand. She turned to look at him. He lay just inches from her, legs flung over the edge. His eyes were closed and his breathing had grown long and even, signaling sleep. Longing rose up in her. She reached out her hand, wanting to wake him.
Then she stopped herself. What had happened in New York had been bad enough, but this...this longing, was a whole other thing entirely. It had to stop.
She was suddenly racked with guilt and doubt. What was she doing here? She had come to find out what she could about Eleanor and the girls, and now she knew. There was nothing more to be learned here. There was no reason to stay. It was time to get back to New York and her work with Frankie and figuring out the life that awaited her.
Grace quietly sat up and stepped out of the bed. She moved closer to Mark in spite of herself. Her hand lingered close to his neck. Sensing her there, he shifted in his sleep. She was seized once more with the urge to wake him for all the wrong reasons. No, she had to leave now.
Still wearing his flannel shirt, Grace picked up her clothes and tiptoed from the room. She changed in the bathroom, then went to the office to phone a cab. Her purse was there, the papers she had taken from the Pentagon just beneath them. She should leave those here, for Mark to return to the archive. But she picked up the file and opened it.
The documents, wireless transmissions and interoffice memos were the same ones she and Mark had looked at earlier in the taxi back from the Pentagon. But now she viewed them with a fresh eye. Could there be evidence among them that Eleanor had betrayed her girls?
There was an incoming telegram. “Thank you for your collaboration and for the weapons you sent us. SD.” Grace felt a tightening in her chest. SD stood for Sicherheitsdienst, the German intelligence service. The message was clear confirmation that the Germans had been operating one of the wireless radios, and that they had brazenly, foolishly perhaps, let London know.
There was a second sheet attached, from the desk of E. Trigg. “Message not authenticated,” it said. “Continue transmissions.” The memo was dated May 8, 1944—right around the time the arrests of Eleanor’s girls had begun.
There it was in black-and-white—proof that Eleanor had known the radios were compromised and she continued to transmit critical information that enabled the Germans to arrest the girls. Grace stared at the paper. It was Eleanor’s own confession, as surely as if it had been signed.
“No...” Grace whispered under her breath. Just minutes earlier, the notion that Eleanor had betrayed the girls had seemed impossible. Now, undeniable proof was right before her.
She thought of waking Mark, telling him the truth about Eleanor. But there was no point. Her worst suspicions about Eleanor, the ones she’d shared with him earlier, were in fact correct. She wished then that she had never come to Washington at all, that she had left it all alone and never found out the awful truth. Overwhelmed by it all, Grace tucked the folder underneath her arm.
Then, without looking back, she left.
Chapter Twenty-One
Marie
France, 1944
Marie had not resisted arrest.
As she stood in the doorway to her flat, muzzle of the gun pushing against her ribs, everything she learned at training ran through her head: resist, fight, run. Though she had not been good at the hand-to-hand combat drills, she had absorbed enough from working with Josie to know to kick at the groin and claw the face.
But little Claude had been standing in the corridor and she did not dare risk the child’s injury in a scuffle. So she went with the police without argument.
They took her to Paris, not in a police car or a round-up wagon as she had always imagined, but in a black Renault with leather seats. One of the officers sat in the back beside her, reaching over to lock her door with an ominous click. As they wound silently through the streets of the Sixteenth Arrondissement, Marie fought the urge to scream out to the passersby on the street for help, women pushing prams and men walking home from work, unaware that she was being held prisoner in the car. Instead, she memorized the route the car was taking in hopes of escaping the prison to which they were surely taking her.
To her surprise, the car pulled up in front of a wide, elegant town house on the Avenue Foch. When they ushered her inside, Marie could see that it had once been a wealthy home, with brass furnishings and deep red curtains that someone had chosen to match the floral rugs just so. The air was heavy with stale cigarette smoke. A German corollary to Norgeby House, Marie thought, watching a messenger scurry between rooms, two uniformed men talking behind a half-closed door.
The policeman who had sat beside her in the car kept a firm grip on her elbow as he led her up one floor of the town house, then another. On the uppermost floor, the policeman unlocked a door to reveal a dormitory-style room with a sloped ceiling, a half-dozen army cots and a shelf full of books in the corner. Faded wallpaper with little yellow ducks suggested this had once been a nursery or playroom. The policeman threw her inside the empty room, the pretense of civility ebbing now that they were out of sight. Caught off guard by the unexpected roughness, Marie stumbled, banging her shin on the frame of one of the cots. She rubbed her leg to ease the throb, then looked around the space, which smelled faintly of sweat and waste. Others had been here clearly, prisoners like herself. But who?
The officer slammed the door, leaving her alone. Marie walked around the room for an escape. The door was locked. She raced to the window and tried to raise it. It was sealed shut, the nails painted over, as if it had been that way for years. She searched the room for other escape routes and found none. Then she walked to the window once more, and looked across the way at the grand houses where people still lived. There was an elderly couple in one of them and she considered trying to get their attention. Did they know people were being held prisoner here? Perhaps they did not care. Through another window, she saw a young woman, an au pair perhaps, serving dinner to several small uniformed girls at a long table. A lump formed in Marie’s throat as she wondered whether she would ever see her daughter again.
Male voices from below pulled Marie from her thoughts. She knelt and pressed her ear close to the heater, trying to hear the sounds that rose through the pipes. A voice with a German accent, asking something. Demanding. The voice that responded was deeper. English. It somehow sounded familiar to her.
Her heart quickened as she tried to calm herself. The German voice came again, then the Englishman. The exchange between the men reminded Marie of a Ping-Pong match, the German asking a question, the Brit saying no. There were several seconds of silence, followed by a sickening thud. Marie held her breath as she waited to hear the voice of the Englishman again. When it came it was desperate and broken, almost a sob.
Marie’s terror grew as she wondered what the German had done to the man, and whether the same fate awaited her. Her panic rose. She raced to the attic door and tried the knob again, desperate to escape, but it was locked. She tried the window once more. The situation crashed down on her then: she was trapped at the headquarters of Nazi intelligence, her cover blown. The Germans knew who she was and that she worked a radio for SOE, perhaps that she had set the charge as well. No one from SOE, either in Paris or in London, knew she was here and she had no way to call for help. The stories she’d heard at training of interrogation and torture filled her mind. Whatever dreadful fate the man downstairs was suffering, she would surely face it next. She would never make it out of here alive or see Tess again.