Page 9 of The Paris Agent
“How dare you insult my integrity!” he said, but he sounded defensive and guilty, and I was sure now that I’d caught him out in the scam. “You are a visitor to this city so you’ll have to trust me. I have lived in Paris my whole life and I know all of the shortcuts.”
“What do you mean... I’m a visitor to the city?” I frowned, momentarily distracted from my outrage at the scam. “I’m every bit as Parisian as you are.”
The driver rattled off a short string of German words, and panic raced through my body even though I had no clue what he was saying. Was this man a collaborator? Were the Germans already onto me? But when I had no response, the driver glanced back at me and chuckled.
“Just as I suspected,” he said smugly. “You’re British.”
“I assure you; I am not!”
“With that accent, you are either from Alsace Lorraine—in which case you’d speak German—or you’re British.” At my stunned silence, he chuckled again. “Your accent is very subtle, mademoiselle, but it is obvious to a native Frenchman.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d misjudged my linguistic abilities. I was convinced my English was flawless when I boarded that ferry to the UK at fifteen. I had just run away from home, intending to reconnect with the British father I hadn’t seen in more than ten years. It was quite a shock to me to arrive in London only to find that he had married a woman who had no idea I existed and my father, determined to keep it that way, wanted nothing to do with me. I was also stunned to discover that while I understood English, I did not speak the language nearly as well as I’d assumed. I worked so hard in those first few years to refine my English until I could live and work in the UK easily.
It had not occurred to me once that eight years in Britain might have left a mark on my accent. No one had mentioned it when I was speaking French twenty-four hours a day during my training with the SOE—but then again, I trained in a cohort that was almost entirely Brits speaking French as a second language. It was likely that, in a group like that, no one would even notice.
My heart sank. Baker Street had gone to great lengths to ensure there was no way I could be identified as anything other than a Frenchwoman. The clothes I was wearing had been specifically designed by French seamstresses to ensure that the seams and buttons and techniques and fittings were all authentic. My makeup brands were French, smuggled across the Channel, and my bags were exact replicas of French brands. Every square inch of my pockets had been searched for ticket stubs or cigarettes or scraps of paper that might give me away if I were detained.
After all of that, it was heartbreaking to think that within two days of my arrival, a stranger on the streets had identified me as a visitor simply from a handful of words. I told myself to be grateful—that this wasn’t a failure but a blessing. Now that I knew about my accent, I could be careful how I spoke, and evenwhenI spoke.
“You are wrong,” I fiercely told the bicycle driver, this time being careful to enunciate each word precisely. “Stop the bike this instant. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
“I believe they call that cutting off your nose to spite your face, mademoiselle,” the driver said, still pedaling furiously, continuing stubbornly on his trajectory away from the train station. “It will rain any minute and you have a train to make. No?”
“Stopimmediately!” I cried, shaking the basket again, and at this, he shrugged and slowed. I hauled my bags and briefcase from the covered sidecar and set off on foot, ignoring the sound of his laughter as he cycled past me.
I walked halfway to Gare St. Lazare before I managed to flag down another bicycle taxi—this time, a helpful, honest driver got me to the station just as the heavens opened and a steady rain began to fall. Thanks to my long detour, I was running so late that my planned breakfast before departure was no longer possible and I had to sprint to buy my ticket then sprint onward to the platform where I discovered that the train had already arrived. A swarm of passengers pushed forward, impatient to board as the rain fell heavier.
I passed several public compartments but found every seat taken in each. Even the designated military compartments were all bursting with German soldiers. Some men had resorted to standing in the aisles.
A German officer suddenly swung out from a door and waved his arm at me. Gold braiding on his uniform, two pips. I clocked him instantly as a Wehrmacht colonel and my rapid footsteps came to an immediate halt.
“Mademoiselle,” he said politely, as I struggled to keep my expression neutral. “Please, follow me.” Sheer frustration shot through my body as I once again wondered if my cover had already been blown. Before I could even formulate a plan, he added quietly, “The train is oversold. You won’t find a seat on any of the public carriages, but I’ll make room for you in ours.”
The all-stops train would take three hours to reach Rouen in thezone interdite,the highly restricted “forbidden zone” that ran along the Nazi Atlantic wall. My SOE trainers would pitch a fit if they found out I had already stumbled into a situation where I would have to spend hours in a compartment full of enemy soldiers, but the minute the colonel made the offer, I had no way to refuse it without arousing suspicion.
Dozens of men stared at me as I followed the colonel into the compartment. As I stepped into the aisle, almost all rose to offer me their seat, in a move so sudden and coordinated it might almost have been rehearsed. I stared back at them, completely lost for words.
“The young lady will sit with me,” the colonel said firmly, and I could not miss the disappointment in the eyes of other men. My mind had been clouded by the frustration of the situation I’d stumbled into, but a realization punched through the fog. The colonel wasn’t suspicious of me at all. He was bored already ahead of the long journey and probably lonely, eager for the company of a pretty girl, and maybe the desperation in the eyes of these soldiers meant they were lonely too.
Sometimes I wondered if there was something wrong with me because I very rarely felt fear, not the way other people seemed to. Instead, I tended to default to anger, and a wave of it surged within me as I looked around that train carriage. I wanted to rail at every one of those men.Look what you’ve been a part of! Look what you’ve done to France! To Europe!
But the SOE had invited me to train as an agent months earlier not because of my skill set or my intelligence or even my courage, but simply because I was a pretty young thing who spoke French and knew France and who would likely never attract much suspicion, even if I did attract attention like this. Apparently I was going to test that theory right off the bat.
Releasing my rage this early in the mission was not an option. I drew some deep breaths to try to calm my racing thoughts.
There was some shuffling around the colonel’s seat as the other men made room on the luggage racks above their heads for my bags. One reached to take my leather shoulder bag, and I pretended not to notice as I quickly sat down and tucked it between my shoulder and the window. As the train left the platform, the men in the seats closest to me turned to face me. In painfully stilted French, a young man of only eighteen or nineteen years old asked me shyly, “What is your name?”
My every sense was on high alert as I tried to articulate each sound carefully to hide an accent I hadn’t been aware of even an hour earlier.
“Felice Leroy,” I said politely, giving him my cover name. This was the name on the set of identity papers I was carrying, but I had spare papers buried in the bottom of my bag, and I could adopt a new cover name if my circumstances changed—even if I simply became anxious that I might have been exposed. My operational name, Fleur, was known only to those within the SOE or the resistance and would not change unless my cover was completely blown at some point.
“This is...you to...be visit to Rouen today?” another asked me in broken French, which meant it was time to trot out my cover story for the first time.
“I spent a lovely Easter with my aunt in Paris, and now I will go spend a few days in Rouen before I go home to Le Havre.”
“Are you seeing boyfriend in Rouen, perhaps?”
A fictional boyfriend might end their apparent fascination with me, but would that be a good thing? This polite chitchat was harmless enough. It was probably better to bat my eyelashes and play along.
