Grace started toward the bar once more, feeling Mark watch her as she went. Heat rose in her. What was it about him that had this effect on her? It wasn’t like her to be swoony and it needed to stop. Grace walked to the maître d’, wondering if Annie had a reservation. “I’m looking for a woman named Annie Rider.”
He pointed in the direction of the bar without hesitation. “She’s over there in the Round Robin Bar.” Between two men, she could make out a female figure in a cocktail server’s uniform. Annie was not a patron of The Willard. She worked here. Grace felt foolish for having thought otherwise. But how could she have possibly known?
The bar was filled with men and clouds of cigar smoke, and for a moment she wished she had taken Mark up on his offer to come with her. But she pressed forward alone. “Excuse me,” she said, and a burly man moved out of the way to make space for her. She raised her hand and Annie came over. “I’m Grace Healey. We spoke on the phone.” Annie could not have been more than thirty. But closer now, her face was careworn, with deep lines beneath the powdery makeup and penciled eyebrows.
Annie looked suddenly uneasy, and Grace wondered if she might decide not to talk to her. “Just give me a few minutes until I can take my break. You can wait in there.” She pointed to a door at the side of the bar. Grace walked through it. She was in a storeroom just off the kitchen containing shelves stacked high with food and a few wooden stools. Watching a mouse scurry between boxes, Grace made a mental note not to eat at The Willard if she ever had the chance.
A moment later, Annie joined her. She sat down on one of the stools and gestured for Grace to do the same. “You said you had questions about my sister.”
“Yes. And about a woman she worked with—Eleanor Trigg.”
Annie’s eyes narrowed, her brows drawing close like an odd punctuation mark. “Worked for,” she corrected sharply. “Eleanor was in charge of it all.” She stood, as if to leave.
“Wait!” Grace said. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”
Annie sat back down slowly. “Bloody Eleanor,” she muttered just under her breath.
Grace wondered what about Eleanor had set her off, but decided that it would be best to change the subject. She pulled the photographs from her bag. “Do you know any of these women?” Grace asked.
“I saw a few of them during my time at SOE.”
“You worked at SOE as well?”
“Yes, as a clerk. I wanted to go over as an agent, too, but Eleanor said I didn’t have it in me.” Annie smiled ruefully. “She was right. Mostly I knew the girls in the field by name.” She pointed to the photos. “Those were some of Eleanor’s girls.”
“What do you mean when you say they were hers?” Grace asked, veering gently back near the sensitive subject.
Annie pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her bag. “Eleanor ran the women’s operation for SOE. They were sending the women into Europe, you know. They were messengers and radio operators.” Annie lit the cigarette and took a drag. She reached for the photos with her free hand. “This one, they called her Josie. She was only seventeen when she started.” Grace imagined herself at seventeen—she had been concerned with coming-out parties and summers at the beach. She could not have navigated her way across Manhattan at that point. Yet these girls were on their own in France battling the Nazis. Grace was overcome with awe and inadequacy at the same time.
“About how many women agents were there?”
“A few dozen,” Annie replied. “Not more than fifty, tops.”
“Then why photos of these twelve?” Grace asked.
“These were the ones who didn’t come back.”
“How did they die?”
“Awful ways, really. Executions. Injections.” The women should have been treated like prisoners of war. Instead, they had been slaughtered.
But under Nacht und Nebel, the Germans hadn’t wanted anyone to know what had become of the girls. “How did you find out?”
“Word trickled back to headquarters,” Annie replied. She exhaled sharply, sending a cloud of smoke billowing upward. “Not official word, in most cases. But from other agents who had seen one of the girls in the camps or heard by word of mouth. By the end of the war, it was no secret that they had been killed.”