Finally, the car turned onto a wide residential street. Avenue Foch, a sign at the corner read. Eleanor knew immediately where they were going. Her stomach tensed. She had read about No. 84 Avenue Foch in the intelligence reports during the war. It had been the Paris headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst, the German counterintelligence agency.
Easy, she thought, willing herself to breathe as the car came to a halt before a five-story town house with wrought iron balconies on every floor. The SD no longer existed. Henri Duquet was a member of the resistance. He was an ally, or at least he should have been once. Surely, he had brought her here for answers.
Eleanor stepped out of the car. The winter air was bitingly cold, a sharp wind whipping across and cutting into her as it sliced across the wide boulevards. The flagpole above the doorway, which had undoubtedly flown a swastika a year earlier, was bare. Henri unlocked the door to the building and she wondered how he had gotten such access. Inside, the foyer was still. It looked like any other house that had been converted for office use, yet Eleanor had read, too often, of the atrocities that had taken place here while interrogating prisoners. She shuddered inwardly, steeling herself as she followed Henri up the stairs.
“Here.” He opened a door on the first floor and allowed her to step through. It was an office, no bigger than the Director’s back at headquarters, with a desk, plus a small table with chairs. The office had been abandoned by the Germans months ago but the walls still reeked of cigarette smoke and urine and something else metallic and rotten.
She saw it then in the corner, one of their own radio sets—undoubtedly the one that had caused their downfall. “The radio... How did they get it?”
“We believe there was a Marseille sector infiltrated by the Germans. After the agents from Marseille were arrested, the Germans obtained the wireless set. Then, by impersonating various wireless operators, they were able to get the locations of the drops of weapons and even personnel. More arrests and even more radios. This particular set, I think, came later.”
“But how could they impersonate the agents? The radios had security features. There were the worked-out codes, the crystals and the security checks.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. Some of the crystals overlapped in frequency. And the ciphers do not appear to have been unique. So it would be possible to broadcast as an agent, even if you didn’t have her exact silks or crystals.” It was a sloppy detail and Eleanor berated herself for not having fixed it when she had the chance. “And the security checks?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
Eleanor walked toward the radio. She ran her fingers over it. One of the radio keys was bent. Her mind reeled back to the day at Arisaig House when she had dismantled Marie’s radio, testing her to see if she had what it took. She knew then without a shadow of a doubt that Marie had been arrested by the Germans.
“Did you see the operator?”
Henri shook his head. “I wasn’t here personally. But we had a contact, a woman who cooked and cleaned for the Germans. She told us of an Englishwoman who had been brought here but refused to cooperate and transmit over the wireless. She held out as long as she could.”
Eleanor cleared her throat. “Was Vesper here, too?”
At the mention of the name, Henri’s face hardened. “Yes.”
“Where were they kept?”
He led her out of the room, up a narrow flight of stairs, then another. A moment later she stood inside a tiny attic room. It was not at all what she expected for the holding cell at SD headquarters, where the most-wanted fugitives were brought for questioning. There were a half-dozen dormitory-style beds like the ones the girls had slept in during training at Arisaig House. A dusty, overflowing bookshelf sat in one corner. The room was bare now, no sheets or clothes or other personal effects. But there were little signs of those who had gone before, letters and other markings carved into the iron bed frames. The mattress of the bed closest to her was stained with blood. Eleanor looked out the window. The tip of the Eiffel Tower was just barely visible over the rooftops. She imagined what it was like for those who had spent their last days here, viewing the splendor of Paris from so close, yet trapped in his or her own despair.
“Here is where they were kept during questioning. A few days, maybe a week at most. Then the Germans were done with them.”
“And from here?”
“Some went to Fresnes prison. Others, like Vesper, were killed here, shot in the head.” He said this unflinchingly.
Eleanor knew that Vesper died, but until that moment had not known how. “And the radio operator?”
“I don’t know. Fresnes, I’d imagine. When the prison was emptied, those held there were sent to Natzweiler,” he added.
Eleanor shuddered at the name of the concentration camp on French soil where so many of the captured male agents had reportedly perished. But something puzzled her. “Why not Ravensbrück? Natzweiler was only for the men, wasn’t it?”
“Perhaps because they didn’t expect to keep them alive very long. The Germans killed them without records. Nacht und Nebel.”
Night and Fog. Eleanor had heard of the program at headquarters, meant to make prisoners disappear without a trace. She pressed back the tears that burned heavy against her eyelids. “How long?” she asked Henri. “How long before the invasion were they taken from here?”
“Not more than a few weeks.” She gasped. They had come so close to making it.
“You know they weren’t the only ones who died,” Henri said abruptly.
She nodded. “I know. You lost people as well.” It was another reality of what had happened; even as the agents were working to liberate Europe, civilians had become caught in the cross fire. Not just partisans, but ordinary men, women and children. Some had been killed as collateral damage in the acts of sabotage—the factory workers when a bomb was set, or the driver of a train that had been derailed. Still others lost their lives through German reprisals against the resistance. Churchill had said to set Europe ablaze, but the hard truth was that innocents got burned.
Eleanor stood in the middle of the tiny attic space, seeing Marie here beneath the creaky rafters, cold and alone. Or had some of the others been here with her? Eleanor would never know.
How had she been arrested? Something had gone terribly wrong in the field, and no one had survived to tell about it. Eleanor stared hard at the walls, as though willing Marie to speak through time. But the room remained still. Perhaps Marie herself had died not knowing.
Or perhaps she had left some kind of clue. Eleanor scanned the room, looking for some sort of hiding place. She ran her hand along the paneled walls.
“We searched it thoroughly, I assure you,” Henri said. Eleanor ignored him, continuing to feel along the floor, heedless of the dirt that blackened her hands. He didn’t know the girls the way she did, nor understand the way they would have operated to conceal things. Her hands ran over an uneven floorboard and she pried it up to reveal a hollow space. She looked up at Henri, whose face registered surprise in spite of itself. But the compartment was empty.