CHAPTER 32

Paris, France
Wednesday, October 13, 1943

THE OCTOBER AIR WAS SO crisp and dry that, as she made her way down the boulevard Richard Wallace, Noor regretted wearing a skirt instead of her slacks. If Armand had been there, he would have teased about her thin Indian blood and offered his coat to wear over her green jacket and roll-neck sweater, his hand to cup her shoulder. Was Armand cold right now? What clothes was he wearing? Her T-strap shoes were wearing down from all her walking. In what condition were Armand’s shoes now?

Soon, please Allah, let these messages help them invade soon, before any more of us are arrested, so Armand and Madame Lydia can be free and safe again.

The clock on the wall behind the concierge chimed half past four as Noor arrived, half an hour before transmission time. Five Wehrmacht officers no older than Kabir leaned against the concierge’s counter as if at a bar, overwhelming the too-small salon with gusting laughter and loud camaraderie. They stepped aside courteously enough for Noor, but the scent of their boot polish followed. She let the brass-grilled lift rise without her and climbed a carpeted spiral to the third storey.

Silence and the smell of mould weighed heavy in the empty apartment; she hadn’t completely closed the front window overlooking the Bois after her last transmission. It hadn’t been this cold when Major Boddington first gave her the key, only three months ago. How annoyed she was he’d ignored the handbook: “Every safe house should ideally have one escape route, preferably two.” But outside the handbook, everything had to be done under less than ideal conditions.

She placed the candlestick telephone on the floor, dragged the marble demi-lune under the window. Retrieved her suitcase transmitter from the bottom drawer of the sideboard and placed it on the table. Delved back in the drawer for her code books, then into the suitcase for the coiled aerial wire. She plugged the transmitter into a wall socket.

Cold air whooshed as, with a little effort, she slid the window upwards. She leaned out of the window. The window ledge had to be why Major Boddington selected this apartment—broad enough to hold the suitcase should anyone come to the door.

Below, on the boulevard, vélo-taxi drivers sweated and coughed, plying their pedicabs like cycle-rickshawallahs in India. Pedestrians raised their collars, nursemaids and mothers pushed prams or walked with children in the Bois. A German officer gave a stiff-arm salute and shouted a final “Heil!” as he left the building and stamped through the front courtyard and away down the street.

No white or grey vans. No one looking up. Safe to thread the aerial along the ledge now.

Back at the table, she opened her message book. First the most urgent message, requesting a Lysander for Renée, Monique and Babette. It might save lives of free people, whereas the second was to notify London about those already captured.

A small yawn was permitted after spending the early hours of the morning sheltering from bombardment in Madame Prénat’s cellar. And she had worked with Josianne all last evening, composing and revising the message to be sent for Phono. Together they revised each word for utmost brevity, utmost clarity. The message had to explain to Major Boddington how imperative it was that Renée, Monique and Babette be flown to safety in London, from a field organized by Marc, not Gilbert. It reminded Major Boddington that Renée’s home had been searched and watched, was no doubt still being watched. Deliberately ambiguous, it also explained that Émile—Phono—needed to be freer “to work on Resistance activities.”

“Resistance activities” could mean more sabotage operations or the dispatching of Gilbert; Major Boddington didn’t need to be told everything.

Afterwards, Josianne used Noor’s code book to garble each word into clear text blocks, incomprehensible to anyone without a corresponding code book.

Noor placed her wristwatch beside the transmitter. Right forefinger ready to tap, like a horse at a starting line, the message copybook open like sheet music before her. Her left hand touched her throat. Habit. Habit of touch for luck and courage, though it was more than three months since she had worn her tiger claw.

Deep German voices outside the apartment door. She tensed, listening for tone, threat, a change in mood. Closer, then boots thumped past on the landing. A laughing response moved past. She took a deep breath.

Centre your mind.

At precisely 17:00 hours, she opened the channel between her pre-assigned kilocycles and identified herself as Madeleine. Then into the dream-space of transmission.

By 17:15 she had finished requesting the Lysander.

She waited with intense and total focus, transmitter set to receive. Wiped her brow, flexed her fingers, listening for a crackle. At last the acknowledging letter sequence came.

Noor moved to the foyer and lifted the earpiece of the candlestick telephone off its hook. The switchboard operator came on the line. Noor asked for the telephone number provided by Odile.

“Odile.”

“Tell Phono to keep in touch with Uncle Marc,” she said in a calm, friendly voice. She depressed the telephone hook.

Back at the transmitter, her hand was steady. The second message was longer than the first. Tap-tap-tap, the bass crackle sounding inordinately loud in the still, empty rooms. Pounding at the single key like the pounding in her heart, because the apparent randomness of the letters she was transmitting was not random at all. Pounding in her heart because these blocks disguised the fate of flesh and blood. Excepting Yolande, she didn’t know the true identities of these captured resistants any more than they knew hers. The code names she was beginning to send stood for the complexity of each life, connections with friends and relatives and fellow resistants, their past, all reduced to a name on a list saying they’d failed to remain in play, saying they had been at the wrong place at the wrong time.

What would happen when London received these code names? Would they now stop sending agents and munitions into the open arms of the Gestapo? Émile had thought they would stop after the arrests of Prosper and Archambault, yet London kept sending more. And this was the result: five names, ten, fifteen, twenty code names, including Yolande’s.

One du’a with each name, to ask the comfort of Allah for wives and husbands who would receive we-regret-to-notify-you letters from the War Office. Sending, sending one block of encrypted text, then her double security check, then another block and the security check again, sending as fast as she could possibly tap.

Almost finished now. Tap-tap-tap.

Finger turning to icicle, just three names to go. Noor glanced at her wristwatch: 17:27 hours.

Too long, too long on the air.

The round dish above a German detection van might be turning at this moment, cocking like an ear in the direction of the one transmitter it couldn’t recognize, now all others were German-controlled. She tried not to imagine it, but once that dish had flashed to mind, there was no stopping its image … She transmitted the last three names.

The operator came back with “Security check not received. Be more careful, Madeleine. Re-send please.”

Some schoolmarm, probably. With a pince-nez on her large, sniffy nose. Now she’d have to repeat her transmission of the last three names. But at least someone was minding security.

Footsteps creaked on the floorboards outside.

Noor’s tapping stopped. The pace of the footsteps didn’t alter, then faded away.

Back to the last two names, and Archambault’s words streaked across her mind. “Some messages, they might be worth one person’s freedom, tu sais, Madeleine?”

The pounding in her heart turned to a machine gun firing in her head, then an artillery barrage at the door. The door burst open. Over her shoulder, it filled with the contour of her ever-present fear: a trench-coated man beneath a large fedora, moving towards her with feral speed.