first. “If they want to die here in the air raid, let them.”
But the first soldier persisted, grabbing Marie roughly and attempting to drag her off her friend. Marie fought, then felt movement beneath her. When she looked down, Josie’s eyes were wide-open, her gaze clear and calm. Suddenly they were back in Scotland and it was just the two of them lying awake, talking in the darkness. Josie’s lips formed a single word, unmistakable: run.
Marie felt it then, something round and hard between them. Josie was clutching a dark metal egg to her chest. A grenade, like the ones they had trained with at Arisaig House. She could not imagine how she had managed to keep it with her all of this time. But she knew Josie had saved it for exactly this moment—her last stand.
“No!” Marie cried, but it was too late. Josie had already pulled the pin.
Marie lifted herself from Josie and as though propelled by unseen hands, burst through the Germans who had clustered around.
She leaped for the door and the daylight beyond. She was powerless no more. She could do this. For Tess. For Julian. For Josie. For all of them.
The boxcar exploded, thrusting Marie forward in the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Eleanor
Germany, 1946
Three days later, Eleanor pulled her rented jeep to a stop before the south entrance of the former concentration camp Dachau.
After leaving The Savoy, Eleanor had boarded a nearly empty train at Gare de l’Est and traveled all day and night to get across France. As they’d neared the German border in the darkness, she’d stiffened. Germany loomed large in her mind from the war, the source of so much suffering and evil. She had not been there since crossing through it as a girl when she had fled Poland with her mother and Tatiana. Now, as then, she’d felt chased, as if someone might come after her and stop her at any moment. But the border crossing was uneventful, a perfunctory passport check by a guard, who mercifully didn’t ask why she was coming there.
She’d reached Stuttgart then transferred to another train to go south. The train had wound its way painstakingly through the pine-covered Bavarian hills, stopping often and detouring around tracks that had still not been repaired since the last Allied air raids. At last she disembarked at what had once been the train station in Munich, now a shell of a building with a lone rickety platform. She had read about the annihilation of Germany in the bombing campaign during the last days of the war, but nothing had prepared her for the magnitude of the devastation: block after block of bombed-out buildings, a wasteland of rubble that made the darkest days of the Blitz pale in comparison. She wanted to take some pleasure in the Germans’ pain. After all, it was their country that had caused all of the suffering. But these were ordinary people, living on the street in deepest winter with nothing but thin clothing to keep out the chill. In particular, the children begging at the train station seared her heart in a way few things ever had. The powerful nation that had been the aggressor had been reduced to dust.
No one knew Eleanor was going to Germany. She had briefly considered wiring the Director the news to tell him where she was going and request that he authorize clearances. But he had said to remain dark. Even if he wanted to help her, he could hardly do so anymore. And he might have told her no. Asking questions in Paris was one thing; poking around the tribunals in Germany quite another.
But not telling him meant she had no official status here, Eleanor reflected as she sat in the idling jeep before the barbed wire fence at Dachau. The camp looked exactly as it had in the photos, acres and acres of low wooden buildings, now covered in a powdery snow. The sky was heavy and gray. Eleanor could almost see the victims who had been kept here less than a year ago, bald, skeletal men, women and children in thin, striped prison garb. Those who had survived had long since been liberated, but she could almost feel their sunken eyes staring at her, demanding to know why the world had not come sooner.
“Papers,” the guard said.
Eleanor handed over the documents the Director had given her before she left London to the guard. She held her breath as he scanned them. “These expired yesterday.”