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 Vend?me 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.