Grace
Washington, 1946
The next morning, Grace found herself on a train headed south for Washington.
After leaving Mark the previous day, she’d gone straight to work, still thinking about her meeting with the consul. At the beginning, she had only been interested in returning the photos to the suitcase. But after learning that the suitcase belonged to Eleanor and that she had worked for the British government, Grace’s questions had multiplied: Who were the girls in the photos and how were they connected to Eleanor? Could the answers possibly be in some files in Washington? The likelihood of finding anything seemed increasingly remote, and her doubts about going there to meet Mark grew stronger as the hours passed.
She hadn’t mentioned needing time off to Frankie until the end of the day. “Is everything all right?” he asked when she finally made the request. The lines on his brow deepened with concern. Grace understood his reaction; she hadn’t missed a single day in all of the time she had been working for him.
“Fine, fine,” she reassured. “Just a family matter,” she added with a firmness that she hoped would ward off any further questions.
“You know working, keeping busy, that’s the best thing,” he offered. Grace’s guilt rose. He thought that she was taking time because of her grief over Tom. Instead, she was jetting out of town to chase a mystery that was none of her business with a man she should never see again. “You’ll be back the day after tomorrow?” Frankie asked. It was both question and plea.
“I hope so.” She couldn’t see the trip taking longer than that.
“Good.” He smiled. “’Cause I’ve gotten kinda used to having you around.”
Grace smiled inwardly at the begrudging admission that Frankie had come to depend on her. “Thank you,” she replied. It was more than just the time off for which she was grateful. It was his making a place for her here and holding it. His understanding. “I’ll hurry back. I promise.”
The train, a sleek blue Congressional Limited, whooshed across the wide expanse of the Chesapeake. Grace looked around the railcar. The seats were straight-backed, but made with a comfortable leather. The gleaming plate glass windows offered a splendid view of the sun-dappled water. A boy came through with his cart, selling coffee and snacks. Grace shook her head; she was cautious with money, not knowing how much things on the trip would cost. Instead, she pulled out the egg salad sandwich she’d packed.
As she unwrapped the sandwich, Grace peered out the window at a Maryland suburb, freshly built ranch houses in neat culs-de-sac. Manufactured towns like this one seemed to be springing up like weeds everywhere since the men had come home from the war and couples moved out of the cities to start families. Grace imagined women in each house, doing dishes and straightening up after the children had gone to school. She was mixed with equal parts guilt and longing and relief at not being one of them.
When she finished her sandwich, Grace balled up the wax paper. She took out the photographs of the girls, studying the mystery their eyes now seemed to hold. Each had a name written on the back in the same flowing script. Josie. Brya. Grace wondered if it was Eleanor’s handwriting or someone else’s.
It was after eleven o’clock when the train pulled into Union Station. Mark met her on the platform, freshly shaven in a crisp white shirt and sport coat, holding a smart gray fedora rather than wearing it. Seeing her, he seemed almost surprised. He had thought she might not come, she realized, as he kissed her cheek in a gesture that was at the same time too familiar and yet not at all enough. She savored the familiar scent of his aftershave in spite of herself. “Smooth trip?” he asked.
She nodded, stepping away from him with effort. “So what’s our plan?” she asked as he led her across the vast marble lobby of the station. She marveled at the high-arched ceiling, which was adorned with an octagonal pattern, gold leafing in the center of each plaster coffer.
“I did some checking on the SOE files,” he replied. They walked outside the station. The air was a hint warmer than it had been in New York. Above a cluster of bare trees, Grace could make out the dome of the US Capitol. She had seen it only once before as a girl on a trip with her family. She paused now, admiring its quiet majesty.
He led her to a waiting taxi and held the door. “Tell me,” she said, when he had climbed in and closed the door behind him.
“Remember we discussed that SOE was a British agency that sent its people into Europe undercover during the war?”
“I do. What were they sent into Europe to do? Were they spies?”
“Not exactly. They were deployed to help the French partisans, supply weapons, sabotage German operations, that sort of thing.” Whatever could Eleanor have to do with that? Grace wondered. Mark continued, “Anyway, I did some checking. An old army pal of mine, Tony, has a sister who works at the Pentagon. She confirmed what the consul said—some of SOE’s files were transferred here after the war.”
“That seems odd.”
He shrugged. “Not a whole lot was making sense right after the war ended. But maybe there’s something about Eleanor in those files.”
“Or about the girls in the photos,” Grace added. “Perhaps they had something to do with SOE as well.” The whole thing had become about something larger than just Eleanor now. She pulled the photographs from her bag.
He moved closer to have a look. “May I?”
She handed him the photos. “If we can find out who they were…” Doubts nagged at her. “But how can we get access to the files? Surely they won’t just let us walk in…” She exhaled sharply so that her breath blew her bangs upward.
Mark smiled. “I like it when you do that.” Grace could feel her cheeks flush. This was about Eleanor and the girls, she reminded herself sternly. Otherwise, she would not be here at all.
“No, it’s true the records have not been made public,” he continued. “But Tony said his sister can get us access.”
“You think she can do it?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
The taxi navigated the wide circle in front of Union Station, weaving between the streetcars as it merged onto a wider thoroughfare. Though the war had been over for months, the signs around the city were still visible, from sandbags stacked against the base of a building to bits of blackout tape still clinging to the windows. Men in tired suits smoked on the curbs in front of nondescript government buildings. There were boys in winter coats playing baseball on the wide expanse of the Mall, tourists walking between the museums—little signs of the city coming back to life.
The cab began to climb the expanse of a long bridge across the Potomac, carrying them into Virginia. The Pentagon came into view. Grace had seen pictures of it in the newspaper, built to accommodate the massive Department of the Army that had grown out of the war. As they drew close, she was awed by the sheer size: each side was the length of several city blocks. A construction crane still hovered over scaffolding on one part of the building. Did they really need all of this now that the war was over?
The taxi pulled through the massive parking lot and stopped close to the door on one side of the Pentagon. Mark paid the driver and stepped out of the car. Looking up at the American flag waving high over the entranceway, Grace faltered; she had no business being here. But Mark came around and opened her door. “Do you want to know about Eleanor Trigg or not?” He had a quiet confidence about him, a sure-handedness that made her feel more certain of herself. She stepped from the car.
Inside, Mark took off his hat and gave his name to the soldier standing behind the desk. Grace peered around the official-looking entranceway and wondered if they would be turned away.
But a few minutes later, a shapely brunette in a pencil skirt appeared. Maybe a year or two younger than Grace, she was impossibly chic, in a way that Grace herself could never quite manage. She wore her dark hair in a sleek cap, the latest style. Her mouth was a perfect red bow. A curvier Ava Gardner. As she brushed past Grace to extend her hand to Mark, there was a faint hint of jasmine.
“I’m Raquel. You must be Mark.”
“Guilty,” he quipped, with the same twinkle in his eye that Grace had seen the night they met. “Tony has told me so much about you.”
“He lies,” Raquel quipped back. Good Lord, Grace thought, with a tug of jealousy she had no right to feel. Were they flirting right in front of her?
“You must be Grace,” Raquel added, making it sound like an afterthought. But at least Raquel was expecting her as well. Before Grace could respond, Raquel turned back to Mark. “Follow me.” She pivoted on one foot. Her heels clicked against the floor as she led them down a hallway along an endless row of identical doors. They passed several men in uniform, their chests crowded with badges and medals, expressions grave. Tom would have been awed by the whole thing, Grace thought, with a note of sadness. She was suddenly homesick for New York and the messy comfort of Frankie’s tiny office.
“We don’t have long,” Raquel said in a low voice when the men had passed and they were alone in the corridor once more. “Brian—he’s the archivist—is at lunch. We have maybe an hour, tops, before he gets back.” Grace hesitated. She hadn’t realized that they would be sneaking in. But it was too late to back out now. Raquel had opened a door and was ushering them down a back staircase.
“The files aren’t classified?” Mark asked.
Raquel shook her head. “Not really public either.” The consul had said that the records would be sealed, Grace remembered, wondering if these were the right ones. “Brian said they arrived without notice from London earlier this year. He doesn’t think anyone has gone through them.”
“Why were the files brought here?” Grace asked, as they reached a landing and started down a second staircase. It was the question that had been nagging at her. Why had they shipped British documents all the way across the Atlantic?
“I have no idea,” Raquel replied. When they reached the bottom floor, she led them into a storeroom with boxes piled high behind a chain-link gate. “The ones you’re looking for should be somewhere over there.” Raquel gestured vaguely toward the right side of the room, where about a dozen boxes were stacked on shelves. “Just be sure to put everything back as you found it. I’ll be back in half an hour.” Raquel turned and went, leaving them alone in the room full of boxes.
Grace looked at Mark questioningly. “There’s no way to get through all of this in such a short time. How do we begin?”
Mark ran his hand over one of the boxes, clearing some dust. “We’ll each take half. We just need to figure out how they’re organized.”
She studied the side of the boxes. Each bore a single letter, handwritten and circled. “What do you suppose that means?” He shrugged. She thought then of the photographs in her bag. Quickly she pulled them out. There was a small notation on the bottom of each picture. “I remember that the consul said something about Eleanor working for a section of SOE.” Sure enough, on the bottom of each photo there was a small plate bearing the phrase F Section.
Mark was already ahead of her, moving through the boxes and stacks to a place on a shelf. “Here.” She followed him and looked up. At least five of the boxes were marked with an F.
“Same letter as on the box,” she remarked. “I wonder what it stands for.”
Mark pulled two boxes off the shelf and set them on the ground. As he knelt to open one of them, Grace found her eyes drawn to the spot where his collar had pulled back to reveal a pale bit of skin, his brown hair curling against his neck. Stop, she scolded silently. Whatever madness had happened between them in New York, that was all in the past. He was Tom’s friend, doing her a favor by helping her to gain access to the files. That was all.
Grace knelt before the other box on the ground, swiping at a handful of dust and coughing. She opened it. There were files, each bearing a surname on the label. She opened the top file. It contained a black-and-white photo like the ones Eleanor had been carrying, only this one was of a man. The file detailed locations and missions in Occupied Europe, presumably which the agent had undertaken for SOE. “The F is for French section,” Mark called. “It looks like these are all people who were deployed to France during the war.”
She flipped to the next file, then another. “But mine are all men.”
“Mine, too.”
That made sense, Grace reflected. The kind of work Mark had described SOE doing would have been done by men. And except for the F notation on the boxes and photos, there did not seem to be any connection to Eleanor. Grace wondered for a second if the trip to Washington had been all for nothing. She would get a train back to New York tonight and return to work in the morning.
“Here!” Mark called, interrupting her thoughts. As she stood and walked over to where he stood by the shelf, he pulled a thick stack of files from one of the boxes. “Regina Angell,” he read aloud from the top of the file. Then he flipped to another. “Tracy Edmonds. Stephanie Turnow.” She took one of the files from Mark and opened it. Inside was a photo like the ones Eleanor had carried. The name beneath the image was written in the same neat handwriting that Grace recognized from Eleanor’s photos. Some of the SOE agents had been women after all.
But none of the names on the files were the same as the ones on the photos, Grace realized as she thumbed quickly through the box. Her shoulders slumped with disappointment. “The names don’t match. These aren’t the right ones.”
“I wonder how many girls worked for SOE.”
“There are about thirty here,” Grace replied, thumbing through the files. “Plus another dozen if the ones in Eleanor’s photos actually worked for SOE as well.” She was surprised there had been so many female agents. She lifted one of the files. Sally Rider, the label read. Inside it was a personnel file or dossier of some sort, a page of background with a photo, then notes about training. The detail was impressive, line after line about the various schools the girl had been through, how she had performed at various tests and drills, all in that same handwritten script.
Grace scanned the file. Born in Herefordshire, it said. It contained a last known contact, not in England, but America. Impulsively, Grace pulled out a pencil and a scrap of paper and scribbled down the phone number in the file. Then there was a list of places: Paris, Lille. The women had been deployed for SOE to undertake various missions in Occupied Europe. The last entry was for Chartres in 1944. Nothing after that.
Grace closed the file and began thumbing through the others. Each had the same basic information, hometown, contact information. It was the list of whereabouts that was most interesting: Amiens, Beauvais. The missions had taken them to all corners of France.
There was something else she noticed, too: lots of lines blacked out. “Someone redacted the hell out of them,” Mark observed over her shoulder.
“Maybe the files on the girls in the photos are in another box?”
But Mark shook his head. “There are seven boxes on F Section in all. The files in the others are all on men.” He reached around Grace to thumb through the box she had been searching. “What’s this?” He pulled out a thin manila folder that had been wedged between two of the personnel files. “This is odd,” he remarked, paging through it.
“What is it?”
“Wireless transmissions. Some interoffice documents and telegrams, too. But it doesn’t look like it belongs in this box with the personnel files. Someone must have packed it there by mistake.” Grace reached for the file, wondering if it would shed some more light on the girls in the photos. She noticed that several of the documents had been issued on the same letterhead: “From the Desk of the Recruitment and Logistics Officer, E. Trigg.”
Eleanor wasn’t just a secretary. She was running things.
There was a clattering at the door to the archive. Grace turned to see Raquel in the doorway. “Raquel,” Mark said. “We weren’t expecting you back so soon.” They could not have been in the archive for more than fifteen minutes.
“I saw Brian walking across the parking lot,” Raquel stammered. The archivist must have come back from lunch early. “Come quickly.” She led them out a back doorway and up a different flight of stairs. A few minutes later, she let them out onto a loading dock. “I’ll phone you a cab. I never should have let you in here. I could lose my job.”
“Thank you,” Mark began, putting his hat on once more. “Tell Tony…” But Raquel had closed the door and was already gone.
“I’m sorry that wasn’t more helpful,” Mark said a few minutes later when they were seated in the cab. “A whole trip to DC for a few minutes in the archives. We could have used hours in there.”
“Agreed. But at least we have this.” She reached in her coat and pulled out the narrow file containing the wireless transmissions.
He stared, stunned by her audacity. “You took it.”
“Borrowed, let us say. I didn’t mean to. I was just startled when Raquel came back early, and I did it before I could think.” Just like with the photos in the station. Hadn’t she created enough of a mess by taking something that wasn’t hers already? “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have.” It was his friend who had given her access to the files and she hoped he wouldn’t be mad.
But he smiled. “That was nervy. I’m impressed. Can I see?” He moved closer across the seat. She handed the file to him. He skipped the first few sheets, which he had seen when they were in the archives. “Eleanor’s name is all over these papers,” he remarked. “It seems like she was in charge, or pretty close to it.”
“Not at all the clerk that the consul had described her to be,” Grace replied. She wondered what else Sir Meacham might have been wrong—or lied—about. “But I still wonder about the girls in the photos. If there were no files on them, could they still have been agents, too?”
Mark pulled out two papers that were stapled together, scanning them. “This is a full list of all of the female agents, or at least it seems to be.”
“Are the girls in the photos on there?”
He nodded and pointed to one of the familiar names, Eileen Nearne, then another, Josie Watkins. They had surnames now, had become whole people. “So they were on the list, but there were no personnel files for them,” she mused. “I wonder what that means.” There was a little notation next to about a dozen of the names—the same ones that were on the photos: NN.
“What does that stand for?”
Mark flipped over to the second page where there was a small legend. “‘Nacht und Nebel,’” he read. “Night and Fog.”
“But what does it mean?”
“It was a German program, designed to make people quite literally disappear.” He closed the file. Then he turned to Grace, his expression somber. “I’m sorry, Gracie,” he said gently, putting his arm around her shoulder. “But it means that all of the girls in the photos are dead.”