Dragonfly, page 11
Bridgette would guess Lapwing to be from Texas. He spoke with a twang except when speaking German. His passion was long-distance running. He’d been allowed to get in a daily run during training sessions, even though their instructors had every minute mercilessly and crucially packed. But soon the team came to deduce that running was part of Lapwing’s cover and the laps were necessary to stay in shape. Bridgette wondered if he was aware that Milton Hall’s females were ogling him from an upstairs window as he ran along the estate’s service road shirtless, long legs golden and sinewy, chewing up the dirt track with effortless ease.
At the pub table, brought back from her ruminations, Bridgette heard Lapwing say, “Let’s ask the major tonight. I’m for a reunion when we get back home.”
They all chimed in: “I second that.” “Name the date and place, and I’ll be there.” “Me, too.” “Anywhere, anytime.” They spoke confidently, as if without question—without a dreamer’s doubt—they would make the date. Bridgette became aware of Liverwort’s gaze turned upon her. “And you, Labrador? What do you say?”
“I’ll send the invitations,” she said, “but what if the major refuses to reveal the information? We’re like classified documents, you know, and he plays that card by the book. Our identities could be sealed in top secret files for years.”
Silence fell. Eyes dropped to their half-imbibed pints, fingers toyed with glasses. The unspoken question they were forbidden even to contemplate spread around the table like spilled beer: What’s to keep us from sharing the information now?
Bucky shook his head. “We can’t, gang. As much as we’d like to, for everybody’s safety, you know we can’t.” Sheepish expressions signaled agreement. The major’s warning, first heard in their initial briefing in Washington, D.C., and repeated many times with bone-chilling examples of the penalties for disregarding the order, must be heeded. You may think it’s safe to exchange names, addresses, information of your civilian life, but let me tell you a story…
The major had then told them many terrifying tales. One OSS agent had been caught, tortured, and subjected to a horrible death because she’d shared details of her private life with a fellow agent who’d fallen into the hands of the Gestapo. German intelligence had managed to track her identity through their network in the United States that had led to her capture in Berlin during the early stages of the war. The poor woman had been bound, gagged, and cremated alive.
“Do not for a moment think your identities cannot be traced in the United States,” he’d said. “I’m ordering you to keep your mouths shut about who you are, your families, where you live, where you were educated, and what you do for work and pleasure. If you want to stay alive, you’ll obey. Understood?”
They had understood.
Victoria now said, “Well, then, to be on the safe side, I suggest we set a place, time, and date to meet once the war is over.”
“Excellent idea,” Bucky said. “Suggestions, anyone?”
All eyes turned to Bridgette. Over the past four months they had begun to look to her as their leader. “Well, I’ve never been to New York City and promised myself I’d go someday,” she offered. “My first visit there would be even more special if it was to meet you guys.”
“Lovely idea,” Victoria said. “I can suggest a place that I went on my first visit there. How about the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue as a rendezvous point?”
“Why not?” Bucky said. “Does everybody agree?”
Everyone raised a glass to concur.
“Now let’s decide when,” Chris said.
Bridgette spoke up instantly. “Tomorrow’s date is September twenty-third, the day our group breaks up. If we lose contact with one another, I suggest we meet at two o’clock in the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library the twenty-third of the first September after the war is over. Is everybody okay with that?”
“Done,” Brad answered.
There was a merry pounding of the table, interrupted when a British Army sergeant from the training staff appeared before them. “Party’s over, lads and lassies,” he announced. “Time to go.”
Bucky lifted his pint and thrust it out to the middle of the table. “To Dragonfly,” he said.
“To Dragonfly,” they all chorused, tapping glasses, and Victoria added tipsily for good measure, “God save the king and bless America.”
And all you wee lambs, the sergeant thought.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Are you all tucked in, miss?” the pilot of the Lysander asked the sweet-faced young agent he was about to drop off in occupied France, a regular Kewpie doll. It took all kinds to do what she’d been trained for, but bejesus…a pretty little thing like her?
Bridgette nodded and wriggled into a more comfortable position in the small aircraft’s cramped quarters, grateful that she did not have a parachute strapped to her back. She was to be set down in a farmer’s field ten miles from Paris, which would be signaled only by short bursts of light, quickly extinguished. She’d scramble down a fixed ladder on the port side of the fuselage and head toward a signal she hoped would be flashed by her contact and not a cadre of Gestapo agents. A vehicle was supposed to be waiting to spirit her away to assume her new life as Bernadette Dufor, newly hired assistant to Madame Jeanne Boucher, owner of the couture fashion house La Maison de Boucher—the House of Boucher.
The flight plan had called for an approximate two o’clock touchdown. They were taking off at midnight—plenty of time to calm her nerves, Bridgette reckoned. She mustn’t panic. Whatever happened, she must not panic. She must trust the pilot to get her to the drop-off point safely, though her confidence would have been considerably bolstered if she hadn’t been told that the Lysander would be flying without its usual defense, communication, and protection equipment. The aircraft’s belly had been painted matte black to be invisible to searchlights, and its upper surface had been camouflaged in dark green and pale gray colors to conceal it from enemy night fliers. If those tricks failed, they would be at the mercy of ground fire and the German Luftwaffe.
“Not trying to scare you, miss,” the Special Operations Executive officer in charge had said. “Just giving you a chance to back out while you can. It’s my job.”
Alistair, a cigarette between his lips, doodled at a table in a far corner, not allowed to offer comment. Each member of Dragonfly was to be given this spiel in individual briefings to allow them the opportunity to withdraw from their missions in private. She was the first to be offered the chance, since she was the first to be dispatched. The understanding was that she could simply get up and leave the premises—“fold your tents like the Arabs and silently steal away,” the SOE officer had quoted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A driver would take her back to Milton Hall and from there to London, where she could hop a flight back to the United States. Bridgette had glanced at her case officer and caught a look that made her think he hoped she’d bail out. As time had gone on during training, the whole team had begun to suspect that he regretted getting them into this mess.
But what was there to go home to? A job as a women’s buyer for the J. L. Hudson department stores in Detroit, Michigan? An empty house within spitting distance of the best friend who’d betrayed her? A tombstone engraved with the birth and death dates of Angelique Duvalier? Bridgette had arrived too late to celebrate her college graduation and twenty-second birthday with her grandmother. When the Greyhound bus had finally pulled into Traverse City and a taxi deposited her before the little house on Elmwood Street, a neighbor informed her that Angelique had been taken to the hospital because of chest pains. She lived two days after Bridgette made it home, the letter from the Office of Strategic Services still in her purse.
Disregarding her case officer’s look, Bridgette said to the SOE captain, “I’m in.”
The captain had then instructed, “Now go grab some sleep. You’ll need it. You’ll be taking off at twenty-four hundred—midnight.”
In the Lysander, Bridgette found space to stretch out her legs. The racket from the single engine was deafening but somehow lulling. She forced herself to relax in the roar and let her mind wander back to how it was that she came to be “in.” By now, September 24, 1942, the first night of the full moon, she’d expected to be on the payroll of Paramount Pictures as an intern of Hollywood’s most famous costume designer, but Gladys Bradbury’s scissors and sick possessiveness had altered that direction in her life. Bridgette still grew numb from the shock of seeing Gladys standing in the shimmering wasteland of slashed fabrics among the troupe of naked dress forms, the rhinestone-studded shoulder of her scarlet jersey toga all that was rescuable of her design. The girl hadn’t gone directly to the Pennant Hotel that day when she left the lunchroom. She’d gone back to the design department to steal the key to the exhibit room the aide had left in the chairman’s door box. The day after the small burial service of her grandmother, Bridgette had contacted the Office of Strategic Services.
Did Bridgette miss her best friend of nearly all her lifetime? Not a jot. But she would miss the friends she’d made in Dragonfly. As she was leaving in the predawn darkness, she’d cast a look back at the windows of their upstairs quarters, and her throat still tightened at the memory of their heads gathered at the sash to see her off. The boys peered from their room and Liverwort from the one next door, their faces pale in the glow of the lamps. They’d given her the thumbs-up, and Bridgette had waved and mouthed See you soon!, doubting they could see her in the dark. She’d climbed aboard the jeep with her heart heavy and her throat throbbing, feeling as they drove off like a tethered boat breaking away from shore.
On the jeep ride to Tempsford, headlights cutting eerily through the damp fog and thick darkness, Major Renault recited in his typical, terse style the litany of instructions already inexpungable in her mind, more a sign of his nerves than hers. Prior to meeting the others in ten days’ time, she was to check out the memorized list of safe houses and establishments deemed secure to make sure they were still viable. And of course she was to begin preparing the wall for her mural. The major wanted her presence noted in the neighborhood before the others arrived. Whatever happened, she was not to be captured, he warned her once again. Despite her impressive performance during training, nobody, but nobody, held out under a Gestapo interrogation. She was the head of the dragonfly, the others her wings. In time she would undoubtedly learn from her teammates’ intel where they lived and worked—in other words, the nature of their missions. She alone would possess the information the Gestapo would be after to throw a net around the lot.
“At the first sign of trouble, get out of there,” he’d said. “That’s an order. You know where to go, what to do. And remember to leave that V in the dog’s ear.”
“I won’t forget,” Bridgette said, but at the takeoff point, before she boarded, he’d seemed incapable of further words and simply pulled her into a tight embrace that lasted long enough for her to hear the rapid thump of his heart.
“Be safe,” he’d rasped as he let her go, this time the huskiness in his voice not due to his predawn pack of cigarettes.
It was ludicrous when she thought about it, feeling so attached to four people whose real names she didn’t even know and thinking of a bossy, chain-smoking, corn husk of an old soldier with tobacco-and coffee-stained teeth as a father figure, but there it was. It was all a new feeling for her. She’d found that she wasn’t such a love ’em and leave ’em sort of person after all, but then these were the first people she’d ever met who she wanted to remain in her life always.
The major had turned them down last night when Liverwort, nothing if not audacious, a little potted, had led the march to his room and rapped on the door.
He’d opened it smelling of tobacco. “Yes?” he inquired mildly.
Liverwort had demanded that after their missions were complete he pass on their real names and addresses so that they could make contact back in the States. “Sorry,” he’d said. He wasn’t allowed to do that. Her lovely face had darkened. Why not? she’d wanted to know. “National security,” he’d answered. They knew the rules of the Official Secrets Service Act. Why not set up a place and time to meet when the war was over? They could exchange names and addresses then.
“We already have,” Lodestar said and related the plan.
“Good for you,” he’d said as if they were children come up with blueprints for a spacecraft to fly to the moon. Did that hint of patronage mean he expected they would forget about the meeting once the war was over or that they would not make it home?
“You are invited,” Liverwort announced.
“I am? Well, then I’m honored.”
“That’s why we’ll need your address,” she said.
“Sorry. No can do. When is this proposed date and where?”
“The first September twenty-third after peace is officially declared. Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, two o’clock,” Limpet answered.
“We won’t start without you,” Lodestar said.
“In that case, I’ll try to make it.”
As they’d started for their rooms, Liverwort had whispered, “He doesn’t think the meeting will come off.”
“O he of little faith.”
“We’ll show him though, won’t we?” Liverwort said, and they had bumped elbows on it.
The mural…from now on her only lifeline to them. What if it did not work as a means to communicate? For the first time, in the glaring light of the plane’s chilly and utter darkness as it began its descent to the drop-off point, its drone now a deafening taunt of the danger into which she was headed, Bridgette could clearly see how all sorts of problems could render the painting useless as a communication pad. Why hadn’t she thought of them before? Why hadn’t the team? And why had the major gone along with her insane idea?
“Get ready!” she heard the pilot yell, and Bridgette, flesh tingling, heart galumphing, took hold of the suitcase radio. She would have one minute in the three-minute operation to climb out and clear the aircraft before the pilot took to the air again in a blast of slipstream. Peering out the canopy, she saw a small fiery light appear on the ground, then more flamed in a line that defined the landing area. God help her, she hoped the hands that held those torches were friendly. Before she could catch a full breath, the Lysander had landed with a jolting bump, made a hard U-turn, and returned to the first light, quickly snuffed.
“Go!” the pilot commanded, and Bridgette quickly shoved back the canopy. Her foot felt for the yellow-painted step to better guide her down the ladder in the now cloud-shrouded moonlight, and she was suddenly on the ground as he threw the throttle into place for an immediate liftoff. “Good luck!” she heard him yell as the plane taxied for departure, and she was alone with her radio in an empty, silent field shrill with the sudden desertion of human life. She waited, motionless, and listened for a man-made stir, someone to claim her and take her to safety. Whoever the shadows were that had laid out the landing strip had disappeared into the deeper darkness of the forest beyond the field. If Gestapo, they would have made themselves known by now.
Bridgette turned toward a hedgerow of hawthorn in full pink bloom, surreal in the filtered glow of the moon, their blossoms looking like bodiless heads. Beyond it must lay a road, she conjectured, her guess confirmed when a car engine suddenly hummed to life and two quick bursts of a flashlight pierced the darkness. She walked cautiously toward the hedgerow and heard the soft opening of a vehicle door. Her heart in her mouth, she could have fainted from relief when she heard a female voice say in crisp French, “Mademoiselle Bernadette Dufor, I presume? Welcome to France.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Victoria—Veronique Colbert—was the first to arrive at the meeting place. It was Saturday, October 3. La Petite Madeleine was a narrow little book-and-tea establishment tucked away on a back street in the quiet and sleepy charm of Montparnasse, a residential district adjoining the Latin Quarter. Less prosperous than others of its kind located closer to the renowned tourist attractions of the Montparnasse Cemetery and the Paris Catacombs, the shop was not often visited by guidebook-carrying German soldiers. Equally unenticing were the shop’s watery tea and dry madeleines that food shortages had forced La Petite Madeleine to serve in lieu of its once delicious tisane tea, buttery pastries, and rich boursin sandwiches. The back room of an establishment of no distinction with instant egress to a maze of alleys and winding streets was an ideal meeting place for a group not wishing to be seen congregating around a café table in their own neighborhood.
The book section of the shop was located at the entrance. Patrons passed through it to reach the tearoom. Victoria had dressed with careful downplay of any detail about her person that might invite notice. In the six days she’d been in Paris, she had already attracted too much attention, a desired effect in L’Ecole d’Escrime Français, the most celebrated fencing academy in France. As calculated, from the first day of her employment as an instructor of foil, the young German military officers enrolled as students had swarmed about her, and now the docket under Mademoiselle Veronique Colbert was filled.
But here, and on the street, it was wise to be invisible, so today she wore a prewar trench coat over a dowdy dress, down-at-the-heels oxfords, and a scarf that concealed the severe bun at the nape of her neck, in contrast to the French chignon that had drawn admiring gazes from her jackbooted students. A pair of thin, wire-framed sunglasses sat on her nose, and she carried a market basket with a week’s ration of bread and cheese. Here was a woman no more remarkable than a weary housewife of the lower classes stepping into the shop for a cup of tea after a day of waiting in grocery lines with the hope food was still left to buy when she reached the head of the queue.
