stairs once more.
A young policeman stood at the top, looking surprised to have actually found someone in the rubble. “Ma’am, you can’t take that,” he said, gesturing toward the box in her arms. “It’s evidence for the fire investigation.”
“So arrest me,” she said, then walked away defiantly, her arms full.
It was the least she owed the girls after what she had done.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Eleanor
Paris, 1946
An onlooker would have wondered: Who was that woman who sat alone every evening at the bar at The Hotel Savoy, nursing a dry martini for four or even five hours on end? She might have been left waiting by a boyfriend or lover, but her face was not sad. Nor did she look ill at ease being a woman alone at a bar. She sat calmly, studying the after-work crowds as they flowed and waned through the revolving door.
It had been three weeks since Eleanor had stood in the Director’s office and received his go-ahead. Though she had been desperate to get started, she had not been able to leave for Paris right away as she’d hoped; there had been paperwork and red tape, even for a mission that was not supposed to exist at all. Then she had to figure out how to get to Europe, jostling for a place amid all of the men and supplies being ferried across the Channel as part of the postwar recovery. Finally, she had secured passage on a transport ship. She’d stood on the deck, not minding the sea spray that kicked up at her face and dampened her dress. Imagining the girls who had dropped in by parachute or plane under cover of night, she marveled at the relative ease with which she was able to enter Europe now.
Since arriving, Eleanor had made the rounds of the government agencies and embassies, trying to get a lead on someone who might have known or heard of her girls, any of them. Marie and Josie, at least, had been deployed to the Paris region and had operated here. The arrest of British female agents would have been unusual, noteworthy. Surely someone would remember.
But the government agencies, still trying to reconstitute themselves after liberation, were in little position to help her. “I’m looking for records of German arrests here,” she had said at the provisional government headquarters two days earlier. “From the Gestapo or German intelligence, perhaps?”
But the civil servant had shaken his head. “The Germans destroyed most of the records before the liberation of Paris. Even if we did have what you are asking for, the files would be classified. Off-limits to foreigners.”
Coming up empty, Eleanor tried other places: the city coroner’s office, a displaced persons’ camp on the outskirts of the city. Nothing. It was more than her lack of status. (The card, which the Director had provided designating her as SOE representative of the War Crimes Investigative Unit, impressed no one.) The responses to her inquiries were cold, almost hostile. She had hoped that there might be some gratitude for the role the British agents had played in freeing their city. To the contrary, de Gaulle and his people wanted liberation remembered as a victory solely of the French resistance. A woman from Britain asking questions, reminding people of how much foreigners had helped, was simply not welcome.
Each night she came back to the hotel bar and she read over her notes and plotted the next day’s assault. She had taken a room at The Savoy purposefully, though she knew the Director couldn’t cover the cost. It wasn’t the central location of the once-grand hotel, or the fact that it was one of the only hotels in Paris whose kitchen had returned to nearly a prewar menu. Rather, The Savoy had been known during the war as a meeting place for agents and resistance. She hoped that one or two might still frequent the bar.
There was no point in waiting in Paris any longer, she realized now, running through the list of leads she had exhausted. She had been here nearly a week and already the Director could no longer support her. She considered going home. But if she stopped searching, that would be it for the girls. Others would go on looking for the men; there were lists and commissions and inquests. Without her, the girls would disappear forever. No, she wouldn’t give up, but she might need to look elsewhere, rent a car and travel north to the other regions outside Paris where the