“That’s when you took the suitcase.”
“Yes. I had seen it there that morning, but didn’t get close enough to notice that it belonged to Eleanor. Only later, after I heard the news, did I put two plus two together and realized it was hers. After what happened, I couldn’t just leave it there.”
“Do you mind if I look inside her suitcase?”
Marie shook her head. “I haven’t opened it yet. I couldn’t bear to.”
Grace laid the suitcase down on its side and undid the clasp. Inside, Eleanor’s belongings remained neat, untouched. Grace scanned the contents, taking care not to disturb them. At the back, nearly buried, was a pair of white baby shoes.
“Those are mine,” Marie said suddenly, reaching for them. “That is, they belonged to my daughter. Eleanor had no children. But she had these for my safekeeping.”
“So she brought them with her for sentimental value?”
Marie smiled. “Eleanor had no sentiment. She did everything with purpose.” She turned the shoes upside down and as she did, a metal chain fell out of one of them. Marie retrieved it from the floor. “My necklace.” She held up a chain with a butterfly locket. “Eleanor kept it safe for me after all.” She batted back tears as she secured the necklace around her neck. Then she studied the baby shoes again, a look of realization spreading across her face. She started working at the bottom of one of the soles with practiced fingers. “Shoes are some of the best hiding places.”
Inside the heel was a tiny piece of paper. Marie unfolded it carefully and showed it to Grace. It was a mimeograph of the order Grace had found in the file. Grace reached into the suitcase to see what else Eleanor might have brought. She pulled out a small notebook. “She always had a notebook,” Marie remarked, smiling at the memory.
Grace flipped through the pages. “There’s to be a parliamentary hearing on what happened to the girls. And look...” She pointed to one of Eleanor’s notations: “Need Marie to substantiate the Director’s role.”
“So she wasn’t coming to tell me what happened. She needed my help to prove that she had nothing to do with the radio game.”
“Do you believe her?”
Marie brushed the hair from her eyes. “Absolutely. The Director’s story never made sense. Julian told me before he died that Eleanor was worried about the radios and they wouldn’t let her cease transmissions. Whoever did this, it wasn’t her.” Marie’s face fell. “Eleanor needed me and I failed her. And now it’s too late.”
“Maybe not,” Grace said suddenly, an idea forming. In the end, Eleanor had died fighting for her girls, just as she had in life.
“But of course it is. Eleanor’s dead.”
“Yes. But what did she want more than anything?”
“To learn the truth.”
“No, to make sure the world knew. She died too soon to tell them. But we can do it for her.” Grace stood, holding her hand out to Marie. “Come with me.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Grace
New York, 1946
One month later, Grace walked out of Bleeker & Sons at the end of the day and took the subway north to Forty-Second and Lexington. She reached the street and found Mark, waiting for her at the corner. “You do have a way of turning up,” she teased. It was a joke, of course; this time she was expecting him. After abandoning him at Frankie’s office to find Marie and then figuring out how to help her, Grace had returned to work to find him gone. He was needed back in DC on business, he’d told Frankie. She phoned him to apologize. She didn’t want him to think the kiss they had shared had put her off (very much to the contrary). He had been understanding, and though he was expected back in DC that night for work, he promised to let her know the next time he was in New York.
Mark was as good as his word: he’d phoned the previous night to say he would be in town for work and could she meet him for a drink? Grace had said yes straightaway, had taken care through the seemingly forever day at work not to mess her curls or smudge her makeup. She was genuinely excited to see him. She could get used to these fun meet-ups every few weeks, without obligation or surprise.
“So the British government itself betrayed the girls?” Mark asked.
Grace nodded. “They wanted the Germans to think that everything was fine and that the circuit was still active. So they kept broadcasting, as if everything was normal. They kept broadcasting and deploying agents and weapons. They wanted the radios in place so they could plant false information about the time and date of the invasion.”
“But that would mean that they sent the agents into a trap.”
“Yes.” Even confronted with absolute proof, it was still impossible to believe. Grace shuddered. The girls had been arrested and SOE had let them disappear, just as surely as the Nacht und Nebel program had intended. “That governments could do such things to their own people...” But of course that was the lesson of the war. People had scarcely believed the things the Germans had done to their own people. In the other countries, too, Austria and Hungary and such, people had turned on their Jewish neighbors who had lived beside them for centuries.
“Who’s to say that it stopped with the British?” Mark said. “The Americans had great stakes in misleading the Germans right before D-Day, too. They might have been in on the radio game as well somehow. We’ll probably never know.”
Or would they? Grace mused. If Raquel could get them back into the archive at the Pentagon... She pushed the thought from her mind. “Why didn’t the truth come out after the war?”
“No one wanted to think about the past. It all changed, you see, the players and the sides. The Russians were suddenly the Soviets. German scientists, who had helped kill people by the millions, were being brought to the US instead of prosecuted in order to work on the atomic bomb. The British government was happy to leave the whole thing buried.”
“Except Eleanor. She wouldn’t leave it alone. They had kept up the radio game intentionally, undermining everything she had built—Eleanor wanted the world to know.”
“What happened after you saw Marie?”
“When we realized the truth about what had happened and Eleanor’s innocence in the matter, I knew we needed to finish the job she’d set out to do—getting the real story into the proper hands. I helped Marie prepare a testimonial about what had happened during the war. Frankie used a contact of his to reach out to the British ambassador in Washington and get Marie’s statement to Parliament.” Grace had wondered if Marie would need to return to London to testify. She didn’t know if the poor woman would have what it took to return to the country she’d left behind. Fortunately, they’d received word that the statement would suffice. They had not known if it would do any good.