It had been three weeks since Eleanor had stood in the Director’s office and received his go-ahead. Though she had been desperate to get started, she had not been able to leave for Paris right away as she’d hoped; there had been paperwork and red tape, even for a mission that was not supposed to exist at all. Then she had to figure out how to get to Europe, jostling for a place amid all of the men and supplies being ferried across the Channel as part of the postwar recovery. Finally, she had secured passage on a transport ship. She’d stood on the deck, not minding the sea spray that kicked up at her face and dampened her dress. Imagining the girls who had dropped in by parachute or plane under cover of night, she marveled at the relative ease with which she was able to enter Europe now.
Since arriving, Eleanor had made the rounds of the government agencies and embassies, trying to get a lead on someone who might have known or heard of her girls, any of them. Marie and Josie, at least, had been deployed to the Paris region and had operated here. The arrest of British female agents would have been unusual, noteworthy. Surely someone would remember.
But the government agencies, still trying to reconstitute themselves after liberation, were in little position to help her. “I’m looking for records of German arrests here,” she had said at the provisional government headquarters two days earlier. “From the Gestapo or German intelligence, perhaps?”
But the civil servant had shaken his head. “The Germans destroyed most of the records before the liberation of Paris. Even if we did have what you are asking for, the files would be classified. Off-limits to foreigners.”
Coming up empty, Eleanor tried other places: the city coroner’s office, a displaced persons’ camp on the outskirts of the city. Nothing. It was more than her lack of status. (The card, which the Director had provided designating her as SOE representative of the War Crimes Investigative Unit, impressed no one.) The responses to her inquiries were cold, almost hostile. She had hoped that there might be some gratitude for the role the British agents had played in freeing their city. To the contrary, de Gaulle and his people wanted liberation remembered as a victory solely of the French resistance. A woman from Britain asking questions, reminding people of how much foreigners had helped, was simply not welcome.
Each night she came back to the hotel bar and she read over her notes and plotted the next day’s assault. She had taken a room at The Savoy purposefully, though she knew the Director couldn’t cover the cost. It wasn’t the central location of the once-grand hotel, or the fact that it was one of the only hotels in Paris whose kitchen had returned to nearly a prewar menu. Rather, The Savoy had been known during the war as a meeting place for agents and resistance. She hoped that one or two might still frequent the bar.
There was no point in waiting in Paris any longer, she realized now, running through the list of leads she had exhausted. She had been here nearly a week and already the Director could no longer support her. She considered going home. But if she stopped searching, that would be it for the girls. Others would go on looking for the men; there were lists and commissions and inquests. Without her, the girls would disappear forever. No, she wouldn’t give up, but she might need to look elsewhere, rent a car and travel north to the other regions outside Paris where the agents had also operated.
Across the bar, she noticed a man younger than herself with close-set eyes, wearing a gray wool blazer. He was pretending to read a Le Monde. “Procès Pour Crimes de Guerre!” the headline read. “War Crimes Trial.” But Eleanor could feel the man watching her over the top of the page. Her muscles tensed. Knowing when one was being tailed was something they taught the agents at Arisaig House from the start, but this was the first time that Eleanor had to worry about it herself.
Eleanor quickly finished her drink and signed her tab, then started across the lobby to the elevator. She stepped inside her room, a once-elegant space that now suffered from a sagging bed and peeling wallpaper.
There was a knock at the door. Eleanor jumped, then looked through the peephole. The man from the bar. Rather overt for one who was tailing her, Eleanor thought. For a moment, she considered not answering. But the man had clearly seen her come upstairs, and he might have information she was looking for. She opened the door a crack. “Yes?”
“I’m Henri Duquet. I was with the French resistance.” Once speaking such words aloud would have been a death sentence; now he wore it like a badge of honor.
She hesitated, still uncertain how he had found her or what he wanted. “I’m Eleanor Trigg,” she offered cautiously, opening the door wider.
He stepped inside, setting down the newspaper he had been reading at the bar. He eyed her coolly. “I saw you over at the ministry where I work. You’ve been asking questions all over Paris. People are not happy about it.”
“Which people?” He did not answer. “Did you know the agents of the Vesper circuit during the war?” she asked. “Vesper? Renee Demare?” She used the girl’s code name as a reflex, then remembered it didn’t matter anymore. “I mean, Marie Roux? Do you know what happened to them?” It could be a bluff. She tried not to get too excited. “If it is a question of money...” she began, calculating how much she could give him from her own funds and still have enough for the trip home.
“Non!” he said fiercely, and she worried that she had offended him. Suddenly, the man grabbed her arm. Looking into his seething eyes, she knew he was angry. “Come,” he said. “I want to show you the blood that is on your hands.”
* * *
Forty minutes later Eleanor found herself standing in the middle of Gestapo headquarters in Paris.
“Blood on my hands?” Eleanor had repeated questioningly as Henri Duquet had led her from the hotel. “I have no idea what you are talking about.” Eleanor felt guilty, to be sure, that she had not acted sooner on the radio transmissions and forced the Director to listen. But this Frenchman could not possibly know that.
As he had led her toward an awaiting Renault, she had tensed. Never let an assailant take you from the primary scene of encounter; it was a cardinal rule of espionage. Once you were removed from your familiar territory, you were vulnerable and weak. She had no business going God knows where with this stranger who so clearly despised her.
“Where are you taking me?” she demanded. He didn’t answer. She thought about resisting, even making a scene to stop him. But he might have information about her girls.
Henri did not speak as he drove through the streets of Paris at dusk. Eleanor hadn’t really paid much attention to the city as she had rushed from one government building to another during her first few days of inquiries. Now she studied the scene outside the window, partly to calm her nerves and partly to make careful note of their route in case she had to find her way back in a hurry. The streets were brisk; fashionably clad couples chatted behind the wide café windows, shopkeepers drew down the awnings for the night. But there was a kind of haze from the war that seemed to linger over it all, muting the once-gay colors.