offer. She had no job now that she’d been dismissed from SOE, nothing waiting for her anymore back at home. The work would suit her.
Then she shook her head. “I’m honored,” she said. “But I hope you’ll forgive me if I say no, or at least not now. Your work is so important, but I’ve got mine and I’m not done yet.”
“‘Miles to go before you sleep,’” he offered with understanding. His words were reminiscent of the American poet Robert Frost.
“Exactly,” she replied, warming to him. They were kindred spirits, each alone and searching. Though she had only just met Mick, he seemed to understand what she was feeling better than anyone. She was sorry to leave him.
Leaving Dachau, she’d desperately wanted to search for the missing girl Kriegler said might be alive. But she didn’t have a single lead, not a document or witness to go on, other than his word. And the safe-deposit box in Zurich, which he’d suggested might contain the answers she was seeking about the radio, had beckoned.
She entered the bank now, the sound of her sturdy heels clicking against the floor and echoing off the high ceiling. Dark, gold-framed oil paintings of somber men adorned the walls. She passed through two enormous columns and entered a room marked Tresorraum. Vault.
Behind the marble-topped counter, a man in a striped ascot looked down over his spectacles. Without speaking, he passed her a slip of white paper. She wrote the number of the safe-deposit box down on it and returned it to him. As he read the information, Eleanor braced for questions about who she was, whether she owned the box. But the man simply turned and disappeared through a doorway behind him. That was how it worked, she mused. No names, no questions. The beauty and the evil of the Swiss bank. Through the doorway behind the counter, she could see a wall of metal boxes stacked high and wide, like tiny crypts in a mausoleum. What other secrets might they hide? she wondered, stashed there by people who had not lived to see the end of the war.
A few minutes later the bank man returned with a sealed oblong box bearing two locks on the top. Eleanor took out the key Kriegler had given her. How had he possibly been able to keep it hidden in captivity?
The bank man produced a second key. He inserted it in one of the locks, then gestured for Eleanor to do the same with hers. She tried to insert the key, but it did not seem to fit in the lock. Her heart seized. Mick was right; Kriegler had duped her. But looking closer she could see that the key was worn and a bit rusty as well. She brushed it off and tried to straighten it, then maneuvered it into the lock.
Eleanor and the bank man turned the keys in unison. The box opened with a pop and the man lifted a second smaller box from inside. The bank man took his key and disappeared, leaving her alone.
Eleanor opened the safe-deposit box with trembling hands. There was a stack of Reichsmarks, worthless now, and a separate stack of dollars. Eleanor took the latter and tucked it in her pocket. It was blood money, but she did not care. She would see that it went to the families of the girls who had left behind children, now motherless.
Beneath the money, there was a single envelope. Eleanor opened it carefully. There was a piece of paper inside, so thin and tissue-like that it threatened to tear as she lifted it. She unfolded the paper carefully and scanned it. Her eyes filled. Before her, in black-and-white, were the answers she had been seeking. It was, as Kriegler had promised, everything.
It was a radio transmission from Paris to London, dated May 8, 1944: “Thank you for your collaboration and for the weapons that you sent us. SD.”
This was the transmission that Kriegler had mentioned, sent by one of the underlings, overtly signaling to London that the radio had been compromised. The transmission was stamped “Empfangen London.” Received in London. Somehow she had never seen it. But someone in London had allowed the transmissions to continue even knowing the Germans had the radio.
Why had Kriegler given it to her? Surely not a change of heart, a sudden altruism. Nor did his fear of prosecution fully explain a revelation so bold. No, it was the truth about the crimes the British government had committed,