She ran her hands along the edge of the bed frame, the rough lines where agents and other prisoners had carved things into the metal raised like scars. She knelt to examine it. Some had put tally marks as though counting off days, others their names. Believe, read a single word. She did not see Marie’s name. She moved to the next bed frame where she found a word written in familiar handwriting. “Baudelaire.” The French poet.
Eleanor recalled the report of Marie’s recruitment, reading French poetry in a café. She walked to the bookshelf, scanning the titles that were mostly in French. She pulled out a book of French poetry and scanned the table of contents until she found a Baudelaire poem, “Fleurs du Mal.” Eleanor turned quickly to the page where the poem began. Sure enough, certain letters had been underlined faintly. She followed the pattern they spelled out: L-O-N-D-O-N. Marie had tried to signal something about headquarters, but what? Once it would have seemed a cry for help. But now, hearing the echo of Henri’s words, it seemed something altogether different: an accusation by Marie of those who had betrayed her and the other agents. Was she saying that someone in London was to blame?
Shuddering, she closed the book, then looked up at Henri. “Earlier you said the blood was on my hands.” Henri seemed less angry than when they had first met, and she didn’t want to stir it all up again. But she had to know. “What did you mean?”
“While I was working as a messenger, I often carried messages between here and Gestapo headquarters. The Germans were broadcasting to London so haphazardly. Why did no one notice and stop it? The Germans would not have been able to manage the radios on their own. They needed help, Miss Trigg. It had to be someone on your side. The way they were broadcasting and got the information so easily.” His voice was almost pleading now. “Somebody had to know.”
“Is that why you came to find me?” Henri, it seemed, had not come to help her, but had been looking for answers of his own.
“My brother was one of the resistance members taken in the sweeps right before D-Day, after Vesper circuit was broken. He never returned.”
“I’m terribly sorry. But you can’t possibly blame us for that.”
“It’s a funny thing, you asking about the girls,” he continued. “I mean, you were in charge of them all. And with your background, it well could have been you. Maybe you were the one who knew all along.”
“Excuse me?” Heat rose to Eleanor’s cheeks. “You can’t possibly think...” He was suggesting that not just London, but Eleanor personally, had sold out her girls. “I didn’t betray them.” But failing them was almost as bad. “I have to go,” Eleanor said, suddenly needing to be away from Henri Duquet and his accusations. She fled down the stairs and from the house on Avenue Foch, ran without stopping down the rue. She looked back, relieved to see that Henri had not followed her.
Turning the corner, she slowed to a walk. It was dark now, streetlights casting yellow pools on the pavement. Eleanor’s mind reeled. A betrayal at headquarters. The idea was almost unthinkable. But Vesper had suggested as much when he said he couldn’t trust anyone in London with his suspicions for fear of a leak. And Marie had seemed to signal it in her last desperate message in the poetry book. Eleanor pictured the meetings at Norgeby House, the inner circle that so carefully planned for the agents in the field. Could one of them possibly be the traitor?
Eleanor neared the Arc de Triomphe. A lone cab was parked at the stand by Rue de Presbourg, and she climbed in and asked for The Savoy. If someone at headquarters had betrayed the girls, that would explain how they had been caught so neatly, one after another, their drop boxes and safe houses compromised. It might explain, too, why someone would have wanted Norgeby House and all of its records burned.
She reached the safety of her hotel room and sank down into a chair. Henri had confirmed that the radios were played back to London. But she still didn’t know how the SD had been able to pull it off. They had to have had some sort of help. She had always known, of course, that her failure to push harder had stopped them from finding out before it was too late. But the idea that she had intentionally betrayed the girls cut through her like a knife. She was no closer to finding her answers than before.
On the chair in her room sat the newspaper Henri had been reading in the bar. She picked it up and scanned the story about the war crimes trial in Germany. She was surprised the French newspaper had given it such prominence; there had been so many they had become commonplace. But this one was different; the defendant was an SD officer who had terrorized northern France for months. Hans Kriegler. Kriegler had been the head of SD—and quite possibly the architect of F Section’s downfall. She saw Kriegler’s face in the files of Norgeby House, details of his sadistic treatment of prisoners.
Eleanor’s grip on the paper tightened. Kriegler was alive and he was about to go on trial. Surely he knew Marie’s fate—and the identity of her betrayer.
Eleanor was going to Germany to find out.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Marie
France, 1944
Marie looked up from the hard concrete floor of Fresnes prison through a foggy haze, trying to focus. Her head pounded and her mouth was parched with thirst. There, to her amazement, stood Eleanor.
“Eleanor...” How had she found her? Eleanor held out a canteen and Marie drank from it, cool, fresh water splashing carelessly out the sides of her mouth as she gulped it down.
Marie bowed her head, feeling the ache of the fresh, unhealed wounds at the base of her neck where it met her back. “I failed you,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”
“Get dressed. I’m taking you home.”
The image faded as Marie’s eyes opened. She reached her hand out, closing it around the emptiness before her. Eleanor was not there. Pain assaulted her as she realized where she was, and all that had happened to bring her here. The morning after the interrogation at Avenue Foch, she had been taken from the attic room and transported unceremoniously to the prison. She didn’t know where they had taken Julian, what they had done with his body.
That was nearly a month ago. The dream of Eleanor rescuing her and bringing her home to her daughter was one she had almost every night since.
It was shouting that had roused her from sleep. “Raus!” voices barked. Not the usual French of the milice who ran Fresnes prison, but German. Something hard clanged against the metal bars of each cell as the doors opened.
Marie sat up quickly. What was happening? For a fleeting second, she wondered if they were being liberated. The invasion had come since her imprisonment, she’d learned, Allied troops inching toward Paris. But the faces around her were grim, pupils dark and dilated with fear. Throughout the large cell, emaciated women were gathering their few belongings, writing notes on tiny scraps of paper. One was feverishly attempting to swallow a piece of jewelry she had managed to keep. These were the last preparations each woman had rehearsed hundreds of times in her mind, knowing this day would come. The rumors they had heard of the prison being emptied were true.