The Paris Agent(86)

“You can’t know that, Captain,” I scolded him. “If they were going to execute you, you’d most likely be dead already. Hasn’t the war brought twists and turns to your life already? Perhaps the next twist will bring the end of it. Perhaps you’ll be home with your loved ones before you know it.”

Now that the men had been able to have a few sips from the canteen, the urgency was gone when the woman from my carriage returned with it a second time. The men savored the water now, sipping it slowly, sighing with contentment as the moisture drained over their parched throats. Jock took his second pass at the canteen, then handed it to one of his companions as he looked to me again.

“What did you do to get yourselves captured?”

“Resistance work,” Romilly said.

“I’m a spy,” I told him, and his eyes widened in surprise. “France is riddled with British spies—men, women—all ages, all backgrounds. The war is far from over, and you are far from doomed.” And then I told him about the success at D-day, and the circumstances of my own capture at Salon-La-Tour…my regret at the decision to travel by car.

“But it is what it is,” I said, shrugging, as I tried to keep the conversation positive. “And now we just have to get through each day until we can escape or the Allies liberate us.”

“The guards are coming back!” one of the women shouted. I looked around—wondering if it was too late for Romilly and me to make a run for it, but she was standing beside me staring at the ground. If I were on my own, perhaps I could have run. My ankle still ached sometimes but was healing.

But I could never escape shackled to another woman if she weren’t in the right frame of mind to accept the risk, and I didn’t need to ask Romilly to know that she wasn’t.

I gave the American men one last determined look and a whisper of good luck, before they slid the door closed. Slow as we were, Romilly and I were still the fastest on our feet, so we rushed back to refill the canteen one last time. When I handed the full canteen back to its rightful owner, an older woman who seemed far too frail to have run down the hill herself, she caught my hand.

“My mother used to say that even in the worst of times, we must look for ways to do good,” she said quietly. “I think I had forgotten until just now. So thank you.”

I felt Giles with me in that moment. This was the spirit with which he’d lived his entire life, and it was how I too could find meaning, whatever came next, even with all of my fear for my son and my uncertainty about my own future.

C H A P T E R 23

JOSIE

Pforzheim Prison, Germany

September, 1944

I tried not to mark the passing of time, but that window meant that I had no way to ignore it. I had seen the end of spring from that cell and had watched summer pass.

One day, a guard came to my door. They usually changed over my waste bucket in the morning so I pushed myself off the bed and picked it up to hand it to him, following the same routine I’d had for months. This time, the guard shook his head in and motioned for me to follow him. Stunned, I took a wobbly step out the door.

“What is the date?” I blurted.

“13 September,” he said curtly.

I had been in that cell for close to five months. Had the war ended in that time? If so, and the Allies lost, it was entirely possible that nothing in the German prison would have changed. I was already struggling to walk on wasted muscles, but my knees gave out at the thought that I was leaving that cell to enter a world where Hitler had won. The guard grabbed me by the arm to drag me into an office after I collapsed. He dropped me unceremoniously into a chair, then sat opposite me to complete paperwork. I sat bewildered as he flicked from page to page, every single slip of paper marked with the words Nacht und Nebel.

Was this sudden change in my circumstances a good thing, or a bad thing? I had no idea, and I was so worn down—so overwhelmed—that I could not even bring myself to ask. Eventually, the guard slipped the paperwork into a folder, propped it beneath his arm, and motioned for me to follow him back out into the hallway. I pushed myself to my feet and collapsed again. He huffed impatiently and once again was dragging me by the arm as I stumbled after him—but then—we walked through a door and I was outside. I looked up at that vibrant blue sky and I sucked in a sharp breath, greedy for fresh air.

All too soon, he pushed me into the back of a van and zipped the canvas door closed behind me. Was this an opportunity to escape? But no. I was still handcuffed, still weak. I had no way to cut the canvas open anyway. I sat alone in that van for an hour or more as it drove, thrown mercilessly from one side to the other with every corner. When it finally stopped, I was once again manhandled from the back and found myself standing outside of another prison.

“Karlsruhe,” the guard said abruptly. “You’ve been transferred.”

There was an all-female wing at Karlsruhe—even the guards were women. A brusque guard named Hertha oversaw my paperwork, and the pitying glances she kept flicking at me as I waited told me I looked every bit as rough as I felt. When she handed me my prison uniform, I thanked her in German, and she was visibly relieved.

“Where am I?” I asked her.

“Karlsruhe is a civilian prison.”

“But…why am I at a civilian prison?”

“You aren’t the only prisoner of war they’ve sent us in the past few days but we have no idea why you’re being sent here. And your N&N designation means we are not supposed to let you associate with the rest of the prisoners. We’re supposed to keep you in solitary confinement permanently…” She paused, glanced at the door, as if checking that we were alone, then dropped her voice. “But we don’t have enough cells for that, so you’ll be bunking in with another N&N prisoner.”