Train stations were too risky, but the Gestapo were always slow to get to the busses, and as they were mostly used by the poorer classes and the French-Italians, it was unlikely they’d look for Madame Fiocca there.
Nancy felt naked as a newborn as she bought her ticket and found a seat in the back by the window next to a very elderly lady bundled up in a dozen shawls and her granddaughter, a pretty, ringleted child of about six years old.
Surely the bus was full. It had to leave. She looked at her watch and the grandmother noticed her and shrugged.
“Old Claude drives this route on a Tuesday, Madame. He’s always late. Still getting his last cognac in at the station bar, I bet. And then he’ll need a piss.”
“I would like to get away,” Nancy murmured.
The old lady gave her a slow appraising look. “Would you now? Traveling alone, are you?” Then she glanced past Nancy and out of the window. “Not those shit-heads!”
Nancy glanced by her. Two men in SS uniforms were interrogating the ticket girl by the gate to the yard and glancing over at the row of busses waiting to leave. Hell. It wasn’t even as if she could get out and make a run for it. Every inch of floor space was crammed. The old lady next to her sniffed very loudly.
“Julie!” The ringleted girl turned away from the counting game she was playing on her fingers. “Sit on this lady’s lap and sing her a song until we get going.”
With a short sigh as if this was a habitual, if slightly irritating request, Julie clambered up onto Nancy’s lap and began to sing her a quiet, semi-improvised version of “Alouette.” At first Nancy was going to protest, then she realized the old lady was offering her a disguise. If the Gestapo were looking for a woman on her own they wouldn’t notice a mother and her daughter.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the Gestapo men approach with a fat and red-faced man in the uniform of the bus company panting alongside them. Some heated discussion followed, and then the two Germans began walking up and down the outside of the bus, peering in at the windows. Nancy lowered her head over the child. A sharp knock on the window and she looked up over Julie’s ringleted head blinking into the eyes of an SS man. Was it one of the ones who had been in the foyer this morning? He looked at her confused.
The old lady leaned over her and banged her fist on the window. “Sod off!” she shouted. “My daughter’s been up with the baby all night and now when she gets five minutes to have a doze you have to bloody wake her up! Sod off, I say!”
It wasn’t clear how much the German understood. But he got the general idea, so with a mumbled apology moved away. Moments later the engine spluttered into life and with a metallic groan the bus pulled off.
“Back on the floor with you, Julie,” the old lady said, and the child slipped away from Nancy.
“Thank you,” Nancy said. “That was wonderful of you.”
She opened her purse and withdrew a note, the old lady looked at it and sniffed again.
“You done these shit-heels damage, my dear?”
“Yes.”
“You mean to do them more?”
“Too bloody right,” Nancy replied.
The old lady nodded sagely. “Then we’re square. Now keep an eye on the little one, I’m getting some sleep.”
Marie Dissard, the woman whose flat they used as a safe house in Toulouse, gave her a good welcome. It was a tiny place, four small square rooms, three of them without windows, in one of the narrow alleys in the center of the city. Nancy knew the place and her host well. Marie was in her sixties, subsisted on coffee and cigarettes and had a large black cat called Mifouf and nerves of steel. They got on well enough, hunched over the radio listening to the BBC then talking about what they had heard. Marie didn’t ask Nancy about Henri, didn’t dwell on what might be happening to him, and Nancy didn’t ask about her nephew, banged up in a POW camp for three years now. They talked about the war, about when the British would pull their fingers out and invade France. Any day now. Had to be.
Three times Nancy said goodbye to her and took the train to Perpignan. There she sat in a little café on the edge of town, staring up at the distant peaks of the Pyrenees and trying to wish away the storm clouds she saw gathering. If there was a chance of starting the journey through the mountains, her contact in town, Albert, would put a geranium on the windowsill of his flat. No flower appeared.
After the third trip she got a message from Marseille from a courier, a young girl with freckles and pale eyelashes who gave her name as Mathilde, that Albert had been picked up by the Gestapo—and worse, so had Philippe.
“When?” Nancy asked, her skin growing cold in the warm safe-house kitchen. “How?”
The girl was drinking Madame Dissard’s coffee in tiny sips, as if she wanted to make it last as long as possible. “The day after you left, Madame.”
Mathilde had huge eyes and an air of utter simplicity. No wonder they’d sent her. German soldiers might stop and stare at her, but they’d never believe she was a spy. The best disguise we have is the assumptions other people make about us. Nancy knew that better than anyone.
Thank God. For one foul moment she had thought that perhaps Henri had… but no. The arrest had come too soon for Henri to have been the source of the Gestapo’s information.
“Who betrayed him? Do you know what happened?”
“I was there, Madame.” The girl caught Nancy’s frown. “At the next table. I had details of a prison escape to give to Philippe, but he must have seen something. He did not give the signal to approach. Then a man came and sat with him. A Frenchman, he called him ‘Michael.’ They spoke for a minute or two and then the men from the table behind Philippe got up, pulled out guns and took him away.”
“But they didn’t take Michael?” Nancy said quickly.
“No, the little shit just sat there grinning and finishing his wine.” She threw out her words. “I know the girl in the café, Madame. She is a good French girl. She will spit in his food every time this Michael eats at her table.”
Nancy shook her head. Still, it was something. “I know him,” she said. “He worked for my husband.”
Mathilde nodded sadly.
Marie ground out her cigarette in the ashtray and lit another. “Has anyone else been picked up since?” she asked.
“Just Albert, on the same day.”
Nancy glanced at Marie and caught the older woman’s small nod of satisfaction. They knew what that meant. Neither Philippe nor Henri had broken yet. Nancy’s stomach twisted and she had a flash of Gregory’s broken hands. Jesus. What were they doing to Henri? She looked away, drank her coffee.
Marie cleared her throat. “What about the prison break plans, Mathilde?”
The girl smiled at her. “They are to go ahead. Tonight. That is why I am here. You should expect them sometime overnight and then they can go with you, Madame Fiocca, to Spain.”
“Albert was my contact in Perpignan, Antoine is dead,” Nancy replied. “Who do I go to for a guide?”
Mathilde rubbed her eyes and yawned before she replied. “I’ll give you a rendezvous, a café on the edge of town.”
“And a fallback?”
The girl shook her head. “We have run out of them.”
Mifouf jumped up heavily into her lap and yowled in sympathy. Mathilde stroked him and he began to purr.
“I worked with a Scotsman named Garrow,” Marie said. “He had to run last month, but we went together to Perpignan once. I have an address. No passwords, no names, but an address. That will have to do as your fallback, Nancy.” She took another swig of her coffee and tapped her fingers on the table. “With Philippe gone, we’ll have to use another forger to make papers for the prisoners. He’s not so good.”
Nancy thought of the men she’d collected from prison breaks in the past.
“Their clothes will need washing too,” she said. “At least it’s something to do.”
The men, seven of them, arrived at 2:30 a.m. How the hell they’d made it through Toulouse in their condition Nancy had no idea. Their clothes were in rags, their faces gaunt, and they stank. Nancy was for once grateful for Marie’s smoking habit, but still, the reek of them.
Once they’d told the story of their escape—drugged wine, a bribed guard, a hay truck and a three-mile walk with a map drawn on the back of a cigarette packet—Nancy ordered them to strip, dump their clothes in Marie’s bath and wash themselves down. They returned to the kitchen one by one, wrapped in old sheets and blankets, pink and scrubbed. The sirens started at dawn. The gendarmes, the Milice and the Germans were pulling the city apart looking for the cast of Julius Caesar now huddled in silence in Marie’s kitchen.
“Dear lady,” one tall English airman said to Nancy as the patrols went back and forth outside. “I can’t face the Gestapo in a sheet. Any chance of getting my trousers back?”
“Nope. Sorry, Brutus. Not until they are clean,” Nancy said. “And then they’ll take at least a day to dry—we can’t hang them anywhere near the windows, can we?”
“Brutus?” He glanced down at himself. “Oh. Yes. Quite.”
He adjusted his grip on his sheet and shuffled awkwardly back to the kitchen.
They split up on the train. Four of the escaped prisoners spoke French pretty well, the rest did not. Nancy divided them into groups, gave them times to turn up at the rendezvous point in Perpignan and drilled them through a series of nods, shrugs and odd words which might get them past a casual checkpoint. The papers wouldn’t stand up to any closer scrutiny than that.
Now she was in a crowded second-class carriage with her handbag on her lap praying for good weather over the mountains. Two of the English were with her, the man who wanted his trousers and a redhead Nancy had taken a dislike to. He’d turned his nose up at the food Marie had offered him and complained that Nancy hadn’t managed to get all the stains out of his shirt. She almost throttled him with it. They’d taken the evening train. True, it meant when they got to Perpignan the streets would be emptying, but they’d still have a couple of hours before curfew to get to where they needed to be going. If their luck held.
Their luck didn’t hold.