Staring at the clock chiming the hour was nothing new. In her ever-vigilant state, she’d discovered the building had its own music: squeaking parquet floorboards, the rattle of windowpanes in the wind, and the melody created by each person who entered. Maggie had developed a well-tuned ear for the songs of the structure—the pelt of raindrops against the glass, the creak of the foundation settling and resettling, the scuttle of rats in the walls. The strain of always listening was slowly driving her mad. To battle the tension, she kept the wireless on at a low volume, the music and conversation combating loneliness.
Maggie was staying, at least for the moment, in a three-story, nineteenth-century h?tel particulier in the first arrondissement, between the Louvre and Les Halles. It was the former residence of a princess, who’d left the city in the early thirties. A film actress had bought the townhouse—then fled before the invasion. In the spring of 1941, the dilapidated structure was purchased by Dr. Maurice Charcot and his twin sister, Agathe, to use as both a physician’s office and private residence. In the year the Charcots had owned the building, they’d done little cleaning and repair, except for the doctor’s office, which was ordered and tidy, and an adjoining small living space for the two of them.
The rest of the manse, a once-elegant house with six bedrooms, was crammed with what the former occupants had abandoned. Armoires stuffed with moth-eaten costumes, hats, and shoes. A staggering disarray of broken furniture, grimy taxidermy, and stacks of mildewed books—encyclopedias, dictionaries, Bibles, fairy tales—were piled on the floor. Stag heads, their glass eyes blinded by dust, watched over rooms overflowing with unstrung chandeliers, broken Chinese bamboo birdcages, and murky oil paintings. An unraveling Aubusson tapestry of a captured unicorn moldered on one wall, while chipped marble statues of St. Francis of Assisi with upraised palms holding doves leaned against another in awkward positions. It was as if the house, like time, like Paris—like France itself—was sleeping under some malevolent spell.
Maurice and Agathe Charcot were with the Resistance, helping SOE. They let the British organization’s French Section use their empty rooms as a safe house, but made it perfectly clear that, if the agents were ever discovered by the Gestapo, both would claim ignorance of the entire operation.
When Maggie had first moved into the Charcots’ house, she’d made the unused library her own. After a thorough cleaning, it was now a pleasant space, tidy and orderly despite the crumbling, chalky blue walls and water-stained ceiling. She’d carried in a desk, a small round table, feather-stuffed chairs with only a few holes, and a long, lumpy, deeply buttoned sofa she used for a bed. A gilt-framed reproduction of Rubens’s Leda with the Swan hung above the fireplace’s mantel, a trifold screen padded with shabby velvet stood in one corner, and large grimy windows covered with heavy brocade drapes looked out to the street.
Maggie spent most of her time either doing the exercises she’d learned at Arisaig—jack-knives, push-ups, sit-ups, and jujitsu—or reading or working out math problems. A stuffed owl, whom she christened Athena, now held a place of honor on the desk, with its neat stacks of blotters in every kind of fabric, a rusty pen resting beside an inkwell, and a sheaf of papers with sketches of the birds she could see from the windows.
Yet no matter how much she cleaned and arranged and then rearranged her space, she felt utterly alone. What am I doing here? I should never have come. What on earth was I thinking? Sometimes she fantasized about abandoning the mission and going back to London. But she knew she couldn’t leave Paris—at least not until she found out what had happened to Erica Calvert and to her own sister. Nightmares of their possible fates haunted her; she couldn’t return to her life in London until she’d done everything she could to find them.
Maggie picked her way across the chevron-patterned parquet floor, stepping over the squeaky spots, to the windows. She lifted the edge of a drape and peeked out at an angle—making sure to remain hidden.
She watched as a young woman in the window of a flat across the street peered out in an almost exact mirror image. Who are you? Maggie wondered, while the slim girl with her flowered dress chewed nervously on one finger. And are you a resister or a collaborator? Or someone somewhere in between?
It was impossible to tell by looking. Maggie knew there were many who felt the deepest pain, sorrow, and humiliation over France’s loss. Open conflict was pointless—it could lead to arrest and execution. So there were those Parisians who reacted to the travesty of the Occupation by keeping to themselves and avoiding contact with the Germans as much as possible.
There were many who made significant sacrifices—workers who turned down well-paid positions with the occupiers, civil servants who refused to continue working under German command. There were also those, such as the Charcots, who sought ways to turn their anger into action. They waged their battles underground and in secret, publishing resistance tracts and hiding British agents.
Then there were those who were indifferent—and, really, wishing only for the nightmare to be over. Like mourners who go to a funeral with feelings of grief, but leave with an inner sense of relief that the worst has passed. And there were Nazi sympathizers. Without openly confessing any allegiance to the Germans, this group thought Nazi rule had its positive side, especially in its ideas about Jews. That it was one’s patriotic duty to not only work with the Nazis but to show them the better side of France. At the very bottom were the lackeys, the thugs, the violent anti-Semites let off their leashes, who embraced Fascism with open arms.
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.