Chapter Twenty
Twenty
VICHY, FRANCE
Zelie had hoped, when they moved Alliance to Marseille, that she’d never have to venture into the heart of the marshal’s government again.
Yet here she was, driving through the familiar streets with half a million francs in the boot of her car, on her way to an appointment with Louis Rollin, Pétain’s chief of the Surveillance du Territoire, while her mother drove her children toward the Swiss border.
She’d rendezvous with them tomorrow morning, after Vichy handed down the verdict, once they’d deliberated.
Bid them farewell. Try to keep her heart from shattering.
She’d already turned over a million francs, in exchange for her mother’s release.
She’d claimed that she had to track down the rest of it, as it had been divvied up when the agents fled the villa.
But when she’d done so, the stern-faced official had started asking questions that had nearly stopped her heart.
“Who is ASO 43? Who is POZ 55?”
They’d gotten their hands on incriminating papers when they’d raided the villa, and she’d been ordered to Vichy for questioning. What confused her was that they hadn’t arrested her then and there—they’d ordered her to report to Rollin.
She intended to say the half million with her now was all she’d been able to find.
She would put on the indignation she felt for Emile and apply it to other, fictional members of her team who had clearly taken the money and run.
Paint Alliance as a broken, faithless organization whose own operatives had turned on it at the first sign of distress.
She mentally assigned more animal names to the remaining agents as Vichy grew ever nearer. The remaining team in Marseille—all five of them—had heartily approved of her idea and had spent much of New Year’s Eve joking and teasing each other about the new monikers.
Only Blaise had raised an objection, and only to her name. “You can’t be a honey badger, Maman. You need to be something big. Important. A lion or an eagle.”
“No,” she’d said, smiling. “My power isn’t in being obviously the best, mon chou, or even obviously a leader. It’s in being underestimated.”
He hadn’t been convinced. “So choose a mythical animal, then. A griffin or a dragon.”
“Oo!” Elise had clapped, bounced. “A unicorn! Be a unicorn!”
Zelie had laughed. There was an allure to naming herself after some mythical beast—because a woman leading a bunch of former-military men was surely the stuff of fairy tales.
But no. That was only her pride speaking, and there was no room for pride.
Honey Badger was the name she’d sensed in that dream should be hers, and she would honor that.
Had it been from God? The whole notion? Marcel had said so, when she explained not only the idea but where it had come from.
As the others laughed and nodded and immediately began trying to outdo each other in proposed names for themselves, Marcel had sat there at the table in Rivière’s vegetable warehouse where they were having their party and had held her gaze.
“The Lord has his hand in this,” he’d said.
“He inspired that dream. I have no doubt.”
A shiver had coursed up her spine then, and it did so again now. Because she knew it was true. Knew it. It was no coincidence that the answer had come to her when she’d finally given her will over to the Lord.
It had been impossible to avoid Marcel while she was staying with his family, and he’d seen the shift in her. Had smiled at her so brilliantly when she told him about her experience that she’d wished, for one minute, that she could ignore wisdom and throw herself into his arms.
What would it be like, to be loved by him? Really, truly, without barriers between them?
All-encompassing. And hence distracting.
This was a perfect example. She needed to get her mind on the meeting, not let it wander back to Marseille. Not track the route toward Switzerland that Maman was even now driving. They were doing this because it had to be done. Each playing their own parts.
This was hers. Had to be.
Her hands tightened on the wheel as she drove past the building Navarre had first used for their work. She tried not to look at it overlong, just headed directly to the small hotel that housed Rollin’s office. Parking outside it, she gave herself a moment before climbing out of the car.
She’d left the new clothes from Madrid back in Marseille for this meeting and had chosen a simple dress that Anne Proust had apparently sent with Marcel for her.
“A gesture of goodwill,” he’d said as he handed her the package the morning after she’d arrived.
“To assure you she does not blame Alliance for her brother’s arrest and will still do her part. ”
Zelie smoothed a hand down the skirt and tried not to see Gabriel’s flirtatious smile in her imagination, tried not to remember the expression of surprise and then delight on his face as Marcel had created a bridge in “Figaro” that shouldn’t have been there.
Had that same surprise been on his features when the Gestapo came to arrest him? But with horror chasing it rather than joy?
After pulling out the suitcase full of money from her back seat, she strode toward the building, only to check herself.
Smaller steps. Less certainty. She had to walk a fine line here today—show pride enough to make it believable that she’d led a sector of Alliance, but contrite and broken enough to make them think she’d washed her hands of the foolishness.
At least until she determined if Rollin was foe or friend-in-disguise.
Lord God, give me your wisdom, your discernment.
A dour-faced man with a drooping mustache exited the building before her, gaze on whatever paper he held in his hand.
He looked vaguely familiar, but it wasn’t until she saw the general’s bars on his uniform that she realized why.
Giraud—the one who’d risked a harrowing escape from a prison camp last spring only to be placed under house arrest. Even now, two uniformed men fell in behind him.
She edged to the side of the pavement, but even so he jostled her as he passed.
Then glowered at her. “Watch where you’re going.”
Irritation clawed through her, but she covered it with a tight smile. “My apologies, General.”
He and his escorts swept by, leaving Zelie to shake her head after them. And pause to draw in a deep breath, praying this inauspicious beginning wasn’t a harbinger of what was to come with Rollin.
The man at the front desk was no more welcoming than the general. When she gave him her name, he directed her to Rollin’s second-floor office with a grunt.
She’d met Louis Rollin before, a decade ago, when she’d been a fresh-eyed young wife still in awe of her husband.
Rollin was military as well—or had been.
She’d admired him then, and even more in later years, when he’d had the courage to oppose the anti-Semitism running rampant through France and the military.
He’d even written a book on the matter so bold that it had been banned by the Nazis.
One small part of her hoped he was secretly on their side. That he’d called her to Vichy to tell her so, to offer to help.
The greater part of her thought that he, like so many others, had decided that the only way to preserve France at all was to do so in collaboration with the Germans.
That was certainly what Henri and Rivière and Marcel and Gustave all thought.
On New Year’s Eve, everyone had tried to talk her out of coming here today.
But she had to. She had to find out what Vichy knew and convince them, somehow, that Alliance was finished.
It was the only way to buy them the time and freedom they needed to rebuild.
If she refused to go, they would know she was still resisting, still plotting.
They would continue to watch her and all her known associates too closely.
Rollin’s office door was open, and when she knocked upon the frame, he looked up from whatever he was studying on his desk.
He’d changed in the decade since she’d last seen him.
Dark hair had gone gray, stress and age had chiseled grooves into his face, and he’d grown one of those horrid little bristly mustaches that didn’t span his full upper lip, only the part under his nose.
Why hadn’t men begun shaving those off when they saw Hitler wore the style too? Or perhaps he’d grown one after pledging his service to Nazi-run Vichy.
Zelie smiled. “Bonjour, Monsieur Rollin. I am—”
“I know who you are, Madame Bellerose. Close the door behind you.” Rollin stood as he motioned her to the chair across from his desk, but he didn’t smile. Didn’t reach for her hand. “Jacques would be horrified to realize what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
Well. That was true enough. She dipped her head and let the old shame wash over her. “I know he would.”
“Sit. And make this right. Who is ASO 43?”
She sat, clutching the suitcase in white-knuckled hands. But she lifted her chin. Just enough pride, after all. “I did not come here to give you any names, monsieur. I came to see if there were any patriots left in Vichy.”
Her one gamble, one toss of the dice.
He scoffed. “Patriots? There are more patriots here than among your ragtag band of troublemakers, I assure you.” He leaned across the desk, hands braced on the surface. Towering and menacing to try to intimidate her.
How cliché. But she cowered, as he’d expect her to do.
“Do you think we want the Germans here?” he asked, voice low and cool. “Of course we don’t. But working with the English is no way to rid ourselves of them, and if you continue to meddle in things well above your capacity and understanding, you stand to make a ruin of all my efforts.”
Above her capacity and understanding? Zelie bit her tongue to keep from retorting and covered her bristling with a wince.
“Who is ASO 43?”