The Paris Spy (Maggie Hope Mystery #7)(6)
As the sky grew darker, a greenish color, the girl across the street drew her curtain. Fat raindrops began to fall, and Maggie wrapped her thin wool cardigan around her. It was always cold in the library. She looked up and noticed a few shoots of buddleia sprouting from a gutter. Two plump pigeons with iridescent purple necks strutted and cooed in front of a row of chimney pots, undeterred by the wet weather.
She padded, catlike in stocking feet, back to her place at the round table, covered with the things she used to take her mind off the sense of impending doom she battled during the interminable days: a box of delicately painted bone mah-jongg tiles, a game of solitaire in progress, and the day’s newspaper.
As she sat down on a spindle-legged chair, her body curving like a question mark, she opened the thin, ink-smudged pages of Paris-Midi to see if any new measures were being implemented. Radio France segued from Maurice Chevalier’s “Toi, toi, toi” to Edith Piaf’s “Un coin tout bleu.” As the song ended, the staccato tapping of raindrops against the windowpanes picked up.
Maggie took a sip of cold catnip tea left over from breakfast as the announcer, Jean Hérold-Paquis, held forth in a blistering commentary, calling for the annihilation of the United Kingdom. A member of the French Popular Party—one of the two Fascist parties allowed under the Occupation—Hérold-Paquis was known for the catchphrase England, like Carthage, shall be destroyed!
She rolled her eyes in disgust and waited for the next song. No one prepares you for the waiting. In her training as a secret agent and all of her subsequent missions—in Berlin, in Scotland, even in London—she’d learned to wait, counting out all the decimal points of pi she’d memorized or running Fibonacci’s sequence as far as she could go. But nothing can prepare you for the reality. The boredom and unease, mixed always with dread.
Although she hadn’t been out of the flat in weeks, the broadcasts on the wireless, as well as the Fascist French newspapers her hosts subscribed to as part of their cover, painted a picture of how much Paris had changed, as if the city were a princess sleeping under a fairy-tale curse.
Nineteen forty-two was almost half over; the year so far had been a cruel one. In Asia, the Japanese, heartened by their success at Pearl Harbor, seemed unstoppable. In Africa, the Desert Fox, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, kept up the offensive. Not only had the Wehrmacht survived the Russian winter, but as the snows melted, it was forging ahead, crushing everything and everyone in its path. In the Atlantic, German submarines and ships were sinking all in their wake. Nazi power seemed to be at its peak. Hitler’s victory looked assured.
And in France there was, of course, the surrender. The armistice signed by Germany and France on June 22, 1940, was a one-sided agreement. In return for being allowed to administer part of a French territory without military occupation—a concession that allowed the German Army to redeploy forty divisions and encouraged Marshal Philippe Pétain, Chief of State of Vichy France, to say “L’honneur est sauf…” or Honor has been saved—France had to submit to all other demands. All German prisoners of war were freed immediately, while all French prisoners of war were to be held until the ultimate German victory. While 25 million people were living in the northern occupied zone, only 14 million were in the free zone, with its government, led by Pétain, in Vichy—the de facto capital of southern, “unoccupied” France.
As a young woman taking French classes, Maggie had gone to the college library to read Le Figaro, France’s leading newspaper. Its motto, from Figaro’s monologue in the final act of Le Mariage de Figaro, was Sans la liberté de blamer, il n’est point d’éloge flatteur: Without the freedom to criticize, there is no true praise.
The august paper, whose writers had once included Albert Wolff, émile Zola, and Alphonse Karr, had relocated to Vichy. But eventually the editors suspended its publication, resisting the censorship enforced by the Pétain government. All of the Paris papers, including Le Temps, had been shut down, and new, Nazi-approved ones had sprung up in their place. Maggie hated them, yet felt compelled to read, both out of a sense of needing to know the worst and to practice her cover story.
As the wind picked up, sending the rain sweeping sideways, her eyes fell on a headline: LE FRANCE SE LIBERE DU JONG JUIF—FRANCE IS FREED FROM THE JEWISH YOKE.
She bit her lip as she read: The arrest of 5,000 foreign Jews between the ages of 18 and 45, and then their removal to Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, has begun. All of the Jews were dangerous without exception—illegal traffickers on the black market who had become rich overnight. They are parasites who have finally received the proper though far too lenient punishment for their crimes against the long-suffering Aryan people….
She couldn’t bring herself to finish.
Flipping through the pages, she spotted an advertisement for the Paris Opéra Ballet’s La Belle au Bois Dormant—Sleeping Beauty. She knew two of her fellow SOE agents and friends, Sarah Sanderson, code-named Sabine Severin, and Hugh Thompson, now Hubert Taillier, were working on the production at the Palais Garnier, in their new identities as dancer and cellist, until they could carry off their own mission. Maggie felt a frisson of fear but disciplined herself to ignore it. Sarah and Hugh are smart and well trained. They’ll be fine. More than fine—they’ll succeed in their job and make it back home, safely.
And when doubt nagged: They will.