The Paris Agent(51)
She helped me cut my hair right there in her kitchen, until the lengths that once reached my shoulders now sat roughly below my ears. She gave me some of her clothing—a hideous felt hat, several layers of undershirts to hide my shape, covered by a cotton dress that smelt strongly of mothballs. I wore deeply unstylish, handmade leather shoes that she’d worn for so long the stitching on the sides was coming undone. She secured some sponges, which I fashioned into inserts to rest against my bottom teeth to make my cheeks look fuller. I’d washed my mouth with iodine to temporarily stain my teeth yellow.
The sum of all of these efforts was that the woman who stared back at me in the mirror seemed decades older, especially once I adjusted my posture to stand with a hunch and made an effort to walk with a stiff limp. We learned such disguise techniques at “finishing school,” and in this case, they were a temporary measure, designed to last just long enough for me to leave Rouen.
Within an hour of that shocking conversation in the kitchen, I was limping my way to the train station, and just three hours later, back in Paris. I walked around the city for hours after my arrival, checking and double-checking that I wasn’t being followed. My contingency plan loomed large in my thoughts—if I saw even a hint that anyone was tailing me, I’d have to find somewhere else to sleep for the night, then to begin the mammoth task of trying to figure out how to reach help in Spain.
By the time dusk was falling, my feet were aching from the dreadful shoes and my back was aching from the artificial stoop, but I’d seen no sign at all that anyone was following me, and so I had finally been reassured enough to go to Célestine’s house.
The door opened, but the woman who greeted me was not, as I’d expected, Madame Célestine. Instead it was my old training partner and roommate Chloe. For a moment, we just stared at one another, then she squinted at me.
“Fleur?”
“Yes!” I said, laughing as I recovered from the shock. “What on earth are you doing here? Are you staying here?”
“I am!” she said, stunned, and once the door had closed behind us, Chloe threw her arms around me. I’d never been much of a hugger, but Chloe was, and over the months of our training I’d grown to love our embraces. Embarrassing tears filled my eyes at the sheer relief I felt at seeing a friendly face, and when she released me, I tightened my arms around her for just a few extra seconds.
“Are you okay?” she asked. She sounded tired too, weary and heavy in a way I’d not seen in her even during our training.
“Of course,” I said, blinking the tears quickly away. “Just tired. How long have you been here?”
“I only arrived yesterday. And you? Madame Célestine didn’t mention you were coming…”
“I’m a few days early,” I said. A vital doctrine of our field operations was that agents should avoid prolonged contact unless it was strictly necessary to the mission, so I suspected that the overlap of our stays at Célestine’s house would not be tolerated for long.
I removed the awful modifiers from my cheeks then took the hat off, too, and shook out my hair. All day I’d been thinking only about bathing and changing my clothes, lying flat to stretch out my spine, but now that Chloe was here, the urgency of all of that seemed to ease.
“Sit! Rest!” she insisted, as she took the hat from my hands and set it gingerly on a nearby sofa. I left Rouen in such a rush I only packed the most essential items of my clothing, and had just one suitcase and the leather shoulder bag with me. Chloe took these from my hands and rested them on the chair beside the hat. “I’m guessing you’ll want some tea.”
“No, I definitely need something stronger today,” I laughed weakly, but I let her guide me to an armchair, and I sighed with pleasure as I sank into it.
“I’m going to go tell Célestine you’re here and to fetch us some drinks. And then… I guess we can swap notes about our first real-world missions?”
“Mine is still very much active,” I said reluctantly. “I’m not sure how much I should say.”
“Understood. I’ll be back soon.”
We swapped as much information as we dared divulge that night. I told her I’d been in the Normandy region on reconnaissance.
“I had some hairy moments,” I admitted, flicking her a glance. “I owe you a favor, actually.”
“You do?” she said, bemused.
“Let’s go somewhere lovely together,” I said softly, and her eyes widened in surprise. “I used that trick you taught me for staying calm more than once. Thank you for sharing it with me.”
“I’m so pleased you found it useful,” she said. “My Maman would be proud if she knew.”
She told me, in much greater detail, about months at Montbeliard, the destruction of the factory there, the exposure of their w/t operator. We tumbled into bed late and I thought I’d sleep like a log, but as the grandfather clock in the hall outside counted down the hours to midnight, I was still wide awake, repeating key facts from the mission to myself over and over again, a memory trick I’d learned to keep track of so much information I could not afford to write down.
In the early hours, I started to think about Giles. I remembered the very moment we met—that charming smile he offered me on his first day of his pilot’s course at the Hatfield flight school. I’d been in England for eighteen months by then and had just won a civilian position with the Elementary and Reserve Flying Training School.