Chapter Sixteen
Waiting in Obersturmbannführer Wolfgang von Waltz’s office at 84 Avenue Foch, Maggie found herself in the grip of a cold intensity, a sort of trance, her mind closed tight to thoughts of anything except meeting the immediate crisis.
She felt oddly composed, her senses heightened, seeing the room around her with increased clarity—colors brighter, light and shadows more defined. Her ears seemed to pick up all the sounds of the Sicherheitsdienst headquarters—the secretaries, the guards, even the nightingale warbling outside the window. A gray parrot hopped and fluttered around its cage. “Pretty Lady! Bonjour! Heil Hitler!” He swayed from one foot to the other. “Have you shot!”
When the German in the elegant suit entered, he eyed her closely, as though she were an objet d’art that he couldn’t quite evaluate without careful examination. “Mademoiselle Kelly,” he said in silky tones, pulling the cover over the birdcage. “Please sit down.”
Maggie did, taking a seat on one of the chairs with cabriole legs ending in gilded beast claws. He sat next to her.
“Permit me to introduce myself. I am Obersturmbannführer Wolfgang von Waltz. And I don’t believe there would be any point in making matters more difficult for yourself by denying anything. In fact, your best course of action at this point is to tell us everything.”
Maggie’s mind was working furiously. What did they know of her? How much information did the Obersturmbannführer have? To the best of her knowledge, they had picked her up only because the café tabac had been compromised and she had used the code words. What else did they know? Maybe nothing. Her fear steeled into resolve to play the mental game and win.
“Your clock is lovely, Obersturmbannführer,” she said, looking up at the Sleeping Beauty. “Louis Quatorze? Or Quinze?”
“You have a wonderful eye, mademoiselle.” The officer smiled indulgently. “I have looked over your passport and papers—all seem to be in order. And we do not want to be obliged to imprison a citizen of Ireland.” He crossed his legs. “Believe me, what we should like most of all is to be able to release you at once. If you’re a sensible woman—and your knowledge of décor suggests taste and breeding—you will simply tell us candidly why you were at the café, why you asked for Jeanne-Marie, daughter of Ora, and I assure you we shall then be able to let you go.”
Maggie maintained her icy calm. “Because I was looking for Jeanne-Marie, the daughter of Ora. I didn’t know it was a crime.” Deny everything, she reminded herself, remembering her training. Deny everything, even if they produce the most incontrovertible evidence.
“All right, Mademoiselle Kelly, tell me why you are in Paris.”
Maggie repeated her cover story, even describing at great length, and with colorful enthusiasm, the fashions she had seen at the House of Ricci.
Von Waltz was not impressed. “But, mademoiselle—why would you ask for Jeanne-Marie, the daughter of Ora, at the café?”
He sits next to me, and not at the desk—the obvious power position, Maggie thought. He’s trying to build a rapport, to use kindness to break me. She cast her eyes downward. “I’m ashamed,” she murmured girlishly.
He took a sharp breath. “No, mademoiselle, no need for shame. Just tell the truth.”
“The truth is—” Maggie’s fingers played with the folds of her skirt. “I’d heard there was someone at Bar Lorraine, someone named Jeanne-Marie, a woman who has access to—” Von Waltz had to lean forward to hear Maggie’s whisper. “—what some call…‘Paris snow.’ ”
“Cocaine?” he asked in genuine amazement. “Cocaine?” Obviously, this was anything but the answer he was expecting. “And who the devil told you that?”
Maggie remembered what Chanel had told her about concierges: they could procure anything, truly anything, for their guests. “Someone at the Ritz—I don’t remember who,” she evaded, fluttering her hands. “One of the staff. And that’s all I was doing at the café this evening, I swear to you!”
“I don’t believe you.”
Maggie straightened. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said firmly, “but I refuse to answer any more questions at all until I have the advice of a lawyer, one appointed by the Irish Consulate, of course.”
“Alas, mademoiselle, your request for a lawyer cannot be granted. Even if the Irish Consulate should send a lawyer here, he could not be admitted to this building. This is the headquarters of the German Secret Police. No lawyers are permitted to interfere with our investigations.”
Von Waltz changed tactics, interrogating Maggie—Paige—on her private life. Never taking his eyes off her for an instant, he asked question after question on minute details of her existence. Maggie was thankful she’d known Paige for so long, and had lived in close quarters with her. She answered easily, even managing to sound bored. Just the way the real Paige would deal with an inept waiter.
Over two hours had passed by the time von Waltz rose from his chair. His friendly smile had vanished. He looked like a schoolmaster, but a bad-tempered one, furious his pupil had outsmarted him.
Despite her exhaustion, Maggie felt a small glow of pride. Still, she was quick to temper it. Be careful. Don’t let your guard down. He’s not done yet.
A rap sounded on the door. “Come in!” von Waltz snarled.
The Gestapo agent with the white scar who had brought Maggie in swung open the double doors and stood in the frame. “Obersturmbannführer, is our prisoner cooperating?” he asked in German. “Has she talked?”
Von Waltz answered, also in German. “Yes, she talked. I’m quite satisfied with the results. The interesting part wasn’t what she said, but what she attempted to conceal.”
Maggie’s emotions churned. They’re speaking in German because they think I don’t understand it. What did I say? Did I inadvertently let some detail slip? Instead of my outsmarting him, has he outsmarted me? Maggie went over every word she’d uttered.
Of course, they might be saying I attempted to conceal something to try to confuse me, as part of their game. Her head hurt. The shock of her capture was beginning to wear off, and she was starting to feel real fear.
There was a scuffling sound in the hallway. Sarah was being marched through by a pair of uniformed guards, her hair matted and face bruised.
Maggie kept her face still, as did Sarah, but there must have been some flicker of recognition. Von Waltz pounced on it. “You know each other!” he exalted. “You are working together!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Maggie replied with hauteur. “I’ve never seen this woman in my life—”
“At Maxim’s!” Sarah interrupted, her eyes on Maggie’s. “We met at Maxim’s! You were kind enough to help me, in the ladies’ room, when I was feeling unwell. Remember?”
“Of course!” Maggie exclaimed, as if just remembering. “The ballet dancer—Madame…Severin, wasn’t it? I’m sorry—you do look a bit…different.” She looked to von Waltz. “A woman? Tortured?” She rose from the chair and clicked her tongue. “You should be ashamed of yourself!”
“You said if Hugh cooperated, you wouldn’t hurt me, you wouldn’t hurt either of us,” Sarah said—letting Maggie know Hugh had been captured as well. “Lies, all lies!”
Von Waltz looked to Maggie. “Hugh Thompson—do you know him, too?”
“No.” Maggie lied without hesitation. “Never heard of him.”
Von Waltz examined his buffed nails. The cuticle of his index finger had torn, and he began to pick at it. “Have you ever noticed, Mademoiselle Kelly, that when a string of pearls breaks and one of them drops off, the rest invariably follow, one after the other? It seems we have broken a string.”
He waved his hand. “Take them both up to the fifth floor!” he ordered the guards, then turned back to the women. “Sleep well, ladies. We’ll speak further tomorrow.”
Maggie and Sarah climbed the winding stairway; on every landing was an armed sentry. They were taken to the former servants’ quarters, which had been converted into small prison cells. The hallway walls were covered with yellow, faded wallpaper of swallows and satin ribbons.
Each of the women was thrust unceremoniously into a narrow, low room, with no furniture except an iron cot with a dirty mattress and a blanket, lit by a bare bulb hanging from a mold-stained ceiling. As the door of her prison room slammed shut, Maggie ran to the Judas grille cut into the door. She couldn’t see out. She twisted the lock, then pounded on the door until her fists were raw.
Defeated, she made her way to the low bed, where she sat, stomach churning and mind buzzing. As she struggled to calm her thoughts, she counted out the Fibonacci sequence of numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…Then she read the graffiti scrawled on the wall behind the bed. NEVER CONFESS read one. FRANKREICH ÜBER ALLES—France above all read another with biting irony. BELIEVING IN YOURSELF GIVES ONE THE POWER TO RESIST DESPITE THE BATHTUB AND ALL THE REST, reassured another. There was DON’T TALK. And, in tiny letters: I AM AFRAID.
Maggie was forced to admit that she, too, was afraid. Deeply afraid. But a childhood of benevolent neglect had taught her self-reliance, study of mathematics dispassionate thinking, and work with SOE bravery—and so she refused to give in to fear.
Think, Hope, she schooled herself. This is like chess—logic, not emotion, is what will get you through. She remembered von Waltz’s metaphor about the string of pearls. So, who broke the string? Who had revealed the café and the question and answer? Who had betrayed them? She thought back to the poster she’d seen on the train. Who among us would be willing to earn a reward by betraying us? She thought of the Charcots. Had hunger and fear led to betrayal? And then she remembered Sarah’s battered face. Or had pain and torture caused someone in Paris’s SOE networks to break?
The overhead light blinked and went out. Left in darkness, Maggie became aware of the building’s rhythms: the clank of the radiator, the whistle of the wind through the branches outside the barred window. And then she heard it—a tapping. A tapping on the pipes.
Maggie listened intently. After a moment, the tapping resolved into Morse code.
Sarah! She was in the room next to Maggie’s, tapping out code and trying to communicate.
Go to loo was Sarah’s message. Check cabinet.
Maggie rose and rattled at her door. “Guard!” she called. Then, louder, “Guard!”
She heard footsteps and then, through the grille, a curt “What do you want?”
“I need to use the lavatory.”
The door was unlocked and opened. The guard was burly and so white-blond and fair-skinned he looked almost albino. “Fine, fine,” he grumbled. “But be quick about it.”
Inside the mildewed bathroom down the hall, there were newly installed bars over the window. Quickly, Maggie searched and finally, in the cabinet under the sink, found the note. It was from Sarah, scrawled in a simple code on a scrap of torn-off wallpaper, looking as if it had been written in blood. The note read that Sarah was able to communicate secretly with Hugh, who was in the cell on her other side. And the three of them could communicate through notes under the basin. Also, had Maggie picked up the bag?
What bag? she wondered, bewildered. Then she remembered the odd premonition she’d had earlier. So Sarah did leave something for me at the Ritz. But what is it? And where is it now?
“Hey,” the guard yelled, banging on the door. “How long are you going to be in there?”
“As long as necessary!” Maggie replied, tearing up the note and flushing it down the toilet. “I’m having some…feminine issues.”
“Mein Gott,” he muttered.
Ten minutes later, she was escorted back to her cell, feeling connected to the prisoners in the adjoining cells, and not quite so alone. She remembered reading A Little Princess as a young girl, about how Sarah Crewe and Becky had lived through the privations of their life in the cold and lonely attic by pretending they were prisoners in the Bastille and Miss Minchin their jailer.
She tapped on the pipes: Found note. What bag?
Top secret. From Calvert. Left at Ritz.
Maggie started. Agent Calvert? She’d killed herself, yes. But if, somehow, they could get whatever she had been trying to bring back to London, her death wouldn’t have been in vain…
Nothing at Ritz, Maggie rapped out.
Left for you yesterday, Sarah responded.
Nothing.
There was an ominous silence from Sarah’s end. Suddenly Maggie remembered Chanel’s ballet tickets—and how they’d been left at the Place Vendôme entrance and not the Rue Cambon, in error. Was it possible that whatever Erica Calvert had been carrying—something so crucial to the war effort she’d committed suicide rather than let her Nazi captors find it—was sitting on a shelf under the desk on the Rue Cambon side of the Paris Ritz?
I know where, Maggie tapped. Safe for now.
There was no more messaging. What else was there to say? And how long before someone looked through the bag and discovered its contents? Maggie went back to the bed; she lay down and managed to doze off briefly. In a half dream, Mademoiselle Charcot’s birdlike face and talon-like hands floated before her eyes. Maggie jerked back to consciousness, trembling with fright, thoughts of betrayal racing feverishly through her brain.
She tried to reason with herself. If I don’t crack under interrogation, the Gestapo can’t pursue its investigation. And then no other pearls will drop off the string.
As Maggie lay on the bed, eyes open, she looked up through the gloom to the water-stained ceiling. Above her was the skylight, with three iron bars, fixed on a wooden frame. Hugh and Sarah most likely had bars on their windows, too. If only…
A surge of adrenaline ran through her. All I have to do is escape before they break me. The insanity of trying to break out of Gestapo headquarters wasn’t lost on her, but still, she was determined to focus on her plan—to escape with Sarah and Hugh, collect Erica’s precious package, pick up Elise and her RAF pilot, and somehow make it to the airfield by midnight on June 28.
She had five days.