chimed eight; Annie’s break would surely be over soon. “Tell me more about Eleanor,” Grace said tentatively. “Who was she?”
“She wasn’t like the others,” Annie said. “She was older. Foreign. From Russia, or Poland maybe, somewhere eastern.” The name Trigg didn’t suggest that, Grace noted. Had she changed it deliberately? “She had come to SOE as a secretary,” Annie added.
“Yet she wound up heading up a group for SOE,” Grace interjected. “She must have been very good.”
“The best. Eleanor had a mind like an encyclopedia, knew everyone’s history and details from memory. And she could read people, tell from the start whether someone was cut out for the Racket. And Eleanor was different, cagey. You always got a sense that she was keeping a secret. I suppose she was just doing her job.”
“Did you like her?” Grace asked.
Annie shook her head emphatically. “No one liked Eleanor. But we all respected her. She was the person you’d want looking after you if you were in the field. She wasn’t someone you would want to have a drink with, though, if you know what I mean. She was an odd bird, awkward, stern, not easy to chat with. I wonder what she’s gotten up to now.”
Grace cleared her throat. “I’m sorry to tell you, but she’s passed.” She decided to spare Annie the grim details. “A few days ago in New York.”
“New York?” Annie repeated, seeming more surprised than upset. “What was she doing in the States?”
“I was hoping you might know,” she replied. “The man at the consulate said they were trying to find family, someone to claim Eleanor.”
Annie ground out her cigarette in an ashtray, which sat on the edge of one of the shelves, leaving a perfect ring of lipstick around the edge. “They won’t. Find anyone, that is. Eleanor was alone, at least after her mother passed. She had no one.”
“But what about her personal life?”
“None. She didn’t socialize or share much. She didn’t seem interested in men, and I don’t mean that in the way it sounds. She wasn’t interested in women either. Only the work. She was an island unto herself. Very private. One got the sense...that there might have been something more to her than met the eye.”
“Tell me more about Special Operations.”
“There were problems from the start,” Annie replied. “You can’t take a bunch of young girls with no experience and think that because you ran them up and down the Scottish Highlands for a few weeks and showed them how to shoot they will manage in a war zone. It takes years to develop the instinct and the nerve to survive. You can’t teach that.”
Annie continued, “And then there was the size. Everyone knows that a covert operation with three people is less safe than one with two. But take Vesper circuit, for example. That was the big one, the unit operating in and around Paris. It was headed up by Vesper, or the Cardinal, I think he was called in code. He must have had dozens, maybe hundreds of agents under his control. The bigger the network got, the greater the risk for betrayal and leaks.”
“I’m sorry,” Grace said. “What do you mean betrayal?”
“Betrayal of the girls, of course.” The room seemed to shift slightly under Grace. “You didn’t think so many of them were arrested on their own, did you? No,” Annie said, answering her own question. “Someone must have given them up.” Though Grace was surprised, she managed not to react; she did not want Annie to stop talking. “They were caught by the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, or German intelligence, mostly in the weeks just before D-Day. And not just in Paris, but all over France. Someone gave them up. At least that’s what Eleanor thought.”
“Eleanor? How do you know?”
“I saw her once, after the war. She came to see Sally, asked to talk to her privately. I wasn’t supposed to be in the room, but I listened in. I had to look out for my sister, you see. Sally had come back from the war in such a fragile state and she didn’t need Eleanor stirring up trouble for her again. She had dozens of questions about the girls who had gone missing during the war. Kind of like you.” Grace’s guilt rose; talking about the war and the work her sister had done could not have been easy for Annie. “A week later my sister was killed in the wreck.”