But first, we had to face this separation. It was time to focus individually on the work that was so much bigger even than the love we shared. The woman Noah saw when he looked at me was brave enough to follow the order to Paris. The man I knew Noah to be was brilliant enough to survive whatever came next for him too.
A kind older gentleman reached down to help me climb up into the carriage, and I stowed my suitcase at my feet and stared out the window at the platform. My eyes locked with Noah’s as the train began to pull away.
“I love you,” I mouthed, and the last time I saw him, he was mouthing it right back.
C H A P T E R 12
ELOISE
Rouen, France
February, 1944
Several days had passed and the butcher’s apprentice was still refusing to speak to me about the arrest of his boss or the work of the circuit.
“My boss has been arrested and his family and mine are relying on me to keep this business going,” he hissed, when I offered him money in exchange for information. “I cannot risk speaking to you!”
I went instead to each of the addresses Basile had asked me to memorize. Some had once been safe houses. All were empty now. There were homes that had been secret training venues for Maquis groups, but as far as I could tell, these had also been abandoned. I made my way to the garages where Basile and his operatives had stored the tons of weapons and explosives Baker Street once dropped to fields near Rouen.
“A garage is the perfect place for such storage because no one bats an eye when cars or even lorries transport the shipments there. Our caches are behind false walls that were installed with the blessing of the business owners,” Basile had explained. “Go in and ask to hire a bicycle but drop the phrase blue basket into the conversation. If the owner is there, he’ll take you to his office and you can verify that the weapons caches are intact.”
But at both garages, even though I batted my eyelashes and asked to hire a “bicycle, maybe something with a basket—oh, even a stylish little blue basket!”， I saw not so much as a flicker of recognition from the men I spoke to.
“Miss,” a worker at the second garage told me, scratching his head. He’d been to ask the other workers if they knew anything about hire bicycles. “Most of us are new but as far as we know, we’ve never had bicycles for hire. Sorry.”
“Could I perhaps speak to the manager?” I asked in desperation. He shrugged.
“He’s away on business. No one knows when he’ll be back.”
Basile had described his key operatives at each garage in detail and told me they should be easy enough to find, but I didn’t locate a familiar face at either business. At a loose end, I lingered in the street after the first garage closed and followed two of the young workers from there to a nearby café bar. I sat near them, but almost as soon as I took my seat, another man approached me.
“Perhaps I could buy you a drink, mademoiselle?”
I offered him a polite smile, and he suggested I might enjoy a cup of coffee. I bit back a sigh as I nodded.
We spent a lot of time in SOE training drinking absurd amounts of alcohol to practice maintaining our cover story while drunk, so it was a real surprise to me to step into a bar on my second afternoon in Rouen to discover that, as a woman, the rations rules prohibited me from buying so much as a sip of wine. I’d now been in Rouen for almost a week and I was starting to wonder if any one of the senior SOE trainers had spared a single thought as to what a woman in the field might need to know.
As for the coffee, I knew the bar would likely prepare me a cup of roasted corn coffee and the thought of it turned my stomach, but a woman sitting alone in a bar was always going to attract the attention of male patrons and to blend in, I had to work with that reality.
“I’m Régis,” the man said once he’d placed our orders. “And you are…”
“Fleur,” I said politely. “Thank you for the coffee.”
“It is my pleasure.”
Fortunately for me, Régis was a poor conversationalist, more interested in talking at me than engaging me to talk, so as he drank his wine and I forced down the corn coffee, I let him chat aimlessly about himself while I focused instead on the conversation taking place between the two young men from the garage. I could see their reflection in a mirror behind the bar, so I knew they were leaning close toward one another, talking quietly as they smoked and sipped wine.
“…so many arrested. Did you even know what they were up to right in front of us…？”
“…can you believe we were working right next to a weapons cache like that? My God! When the Gestapo pulled down that wall…”
“I only found this job because of Blaise, you know. We’ve been neighbors for years and I had no idea…never suspected he was involved in the resistance! But last night, they came for him too. They woke half the neighborhood up when they smashed in his door…”
My companion was midsentence when I watched in the reflection as the men behind me rose. I slid off my stool and at his scowl, offered an apologetic look.
“I’m sorry, Régis,” I pleaded, pressing a hand to my stomach. “I’m feeling terribly unwell.” His irritation was palpable, and that in turn irritated me. God save me from men who thought they were entitled to so much as a minute of a woman’s time just because they bought her a drink! I needed to leave quickly and I wanted to make this man squirm a little. I bent forward and winced as I dropped my voice and added, “I have terrible women’s problems, you see.”
At that, Régis recoiled as if I’d slapped him and nodded hastily to indicate I should go.
I followed the garage workers into the street and tailed them from a distance over the next half-dozen blocks. They stopped to exchange farewells, at which point I hung back, leaning against a lamppost and pretending to search through my handbag. One of the men walked to the entrance to a small block of apartments, and the second continued walking.
I couldn’t easily check inside the apartment building to see if any doors were damaged like the one they were discussing in the bar, so I made a mental note of where the building was, and continued following the second man. After another four blocks he turned into the yard of a small house. Next door was a house that was the mirror image of his own except that the front door was boarded up.
And best of all, behind the faded curtains on the windows at the front of the house, I could see that lights were on inside. Someone may have been arrested last night, but someone else had definitely been left behind.
It was close to curfew now—I would have to move fast. I jogged to the laneway behind the houses and located the small courtyard attached to the home with the damaged front door. I pulled open the wooden gate slowly then crept inside. Here the curtains had not been drawn, so I could see right into the house, where a young woman was feeding a little boy as he sat in a wooden high chair. The child was just a toddler, with light brown hair and big brown eyes, rosy cheeks and a little graze on his forehead, as if he’d stumbled trying to walk. The young woman’s nose was red and raw and her eyes swollen as if she’d been crying. Still, she looked at the child with such love in her gaze. As if he were her most precious treasure. As if he was all she had left in the world.