Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Eight

The escape from the cable car was successful, the truck was where it was supposed to be and the Lysanders were waiting to carry them out of Germany. Max and Genevieve, the latter over Max’s renewed objections, were dropped off in France. The others went on to England for medical treatment. Genevieve took up residence in a flat near Rocheford as she waited for the invasion to be launched. Thanks to Lillian’s courage, the Germans were all but convinced now that the Allied attack would be launched in Pas-de-Calais, and as a result, Normandy and the area around Cherbourg were under slightly less pressure and scrutiny from the Germans. That benefited Genevieve, who was in hiding, with false identity papers, her hair cut short and dyed a nondescript brown, her face scrubbed clean, under the name Giselle Martine, supposedly a widow who sold soap. Word filtered through that after the devastating attack the German press was calling the “Massacre at Eber Schloss,” there was a price on her head. Only Max, who also had a price on his head and had also changed identities, and who stopped by as often as he could, although he was busy carrying out his assigned role in preparing for the invasion, and Emmy, who’d recovered and returned to France to resume her work as Merlin, knew who she really was. Lillian, safe in England, had told her that the signal for the invasion would be broadcast out of London through the BBC, which meant Genevieve spent endless hours listening to the radio. In the meantime, she harvested Lillian’s mushrooms as her mother had directed and went for long walks that refreshed her knowledge of the marsh. When the time came, there would be no room for mistakes.

On one stormy afternoon—the invasion needed fair weather to launch, so she didn’t fear being out of place when the signal came—she took the bus to Vère. The Sisters there operated an orphanage in a rambling, half-timbered house on ten hectares of land. Coming as a Good Samaritan with a contribution toward the upkeep of the children, she was welcomed. Anna—Anna Grangier now, her true identity erased by false papers—played happily with half a dozen other children in a large room in the rear. Watching her, Genevieve thought of Rachel, her mother, and felt a wave of sadness. But Anna was safe, and well, and protected, and that, Genevieve knew, was what Rachel would wish for her.

On June fifth, at around 9:00 p.m., not long after dusk had turned to full dark, she sat at the small table where she took her meals in the dismal, one-room flat that was all the person she was pretending to be could afford, listening to the radio that was turned down very low because possessing one was forbidden. As she listened, she methodically worked a mortar and pestle to grind the last of the mushrooms she had dried into powder.

The announcer cut away from an orchestra playing a cheerful medley of what they called “Swing Time Melodies.” Another voice crackled over the tinny airwaves: “The carrots are cooked. Repeat, the carrots are cooked.”

That was it: the signal.

Galvanized, she jumped up, scooped her freshly made mushroom powder into the bag with the rest, pulled on the dark shirt, trousers and flat-heeled shoes she’d scrounged up during the preceding days in anticipation of this moment, slipped out of the building, hopped onto her bicycle, and pedaled through the windy, overcast night to Rocheford.

She was terrified: anything could go wrong. She could run into a German patrol. The plan could have been betrayed.

Yet she felt exhilarated, too. Tomorrow the free world rolled the dice, its survival on the line. Tonight, so did she.

The cellar cave at Rocheford was the rendezvous point. Already there, waiting for her, was the team she was to lead through the marsh.

“I’ve brought supplies,” she greeted the men gathered around her mother’s worktable as she let herself in. It was the agreed-upon code.

“I hope you brought dinner, too,” came the looked-for response. The voice was familiar.

A single shuttered lantern in the middle of the table left most of the cave in darkness and cast leaping shadows everywhere. She peered through the uncertain light at the speaker and recognized him as the newcomer, the dark, wiry Basque whom she’d met the day she’d rushed to Rocheford looking for her mother. He was thinner now, gaunt, in fact. So were the other men. So was she, she knew. As Genevieve Dumont, she’d been privileged to partake of the same food as the German invaders. As Giselle Martine, she starved on Jerusalem artichokes, that food for cows, and turnips and greens. The edible mushrooms her mother had left behind were gone when she got back to the cave, consumed no doubt by members of the Resistance network once she was no longer there to protect them. The skullcaps, grown in a hidden, nearly inaccessible alcove, were all that had remained.

The newcomer didn’t identify himself. No one did. Secrecy was their shield.

Instead he rose to his feet. “You,” he said.

“You,” she replied, equally rude, and looked past him at the others. She didn’t know any of them. They didn’t know her. There were five men in all. The team she was leading was supposed to consist only of four. One looked like a shopkeeper. The others were dressed all in dark clothes, with knit caps on their heads.

“If you are Rene—” it was a code name, told to her by Lillian “—this is for you.”

She held the bag of powdered mushrooms out toward the shopkeeper. He stepped forward and took it, nodded his thanks, sent a look around the assembled men, said, “God keep us all,” and was gone.

This was another, more personal contribution to the defeat of the Nazis that Lillian had planned to make, quite aside from her official assignment to act as a guide through the marsh, which she’d asked Genevieve to carry out in her stead: an arrangement with her friend the baker who prepared food each day for the German soldiers stationed at Fort du Roule.

“What’s in the bag?” one of the men asked, ever suspicious. Genevieve didn’t blame him. Suspicion, she had learned, was how they all survived.

“A special flour for the bread he bakes each morning for the German soldiers,” the newcomer replied. “They will have it tomorrow with their breakfasts.”

He didn’t specify that the “special flour” was ground mushrooms. Specifically, ground skullcap mushrooms. It was, perhaps, better that the others didn’t know.

What you don’t know, you can’t tell: she could almost hear Max saying it. And if tomorrow went wrong, they didn’t want anyone knowing what she, Lillian and the baker had done. All those who ate that bread would, depending on the concentration of powder in it, either fall violently ill or die. One more small step toward the weakening of the German defensive line.

“Let’s go,” the newcomer said, precluding any more questions, and they did.

Theirs was a life-or-death mission to disable the equipment that worked the lock that controlled water levels along this westernmost section of the Normandy beaches. In the event of an attack, the Germans planned to flood the marshes behind the beach and the road that ran through them as soon as the invasion began, cutting off the beach so that landing Allied forces were unable to penetrate farther into the interior and would be trapped where they could easily be cut down by strategically placed German guns. Two coastal artillery batteries were in position to open fire on the beach for just that purpose.

The lock control mechanism was housed in a building that was heavily guarded to the front, toward the beach and the sea. As the marsh behind it was judged impassable, the back of the building was guarded only by a patrol that passed immediately behind it at set times. That made destroying the mechanism a stealth mission rather than a battle. Instead of blowing it up, which would attract unwanted attention and even, perhaps, send up a warning flag that the invasion was poised to begin, and in Normandy rather than Pas-de-Calais, where the bulk of the preparations were now taking place, they simply broke in and busted the thing.

The Germans wouldn’t even realize it had been done until they tried to use it, and by then it would be too late.

Mission complete, Genevieve led the party back through the tall weeds and scrub trees that covered the thousands of hectares of brackish water and oozing silt. The night was dark but calm. The storms that had settled over the region for most of the previous week had finally blown themselves out. The temperature was cool rather than cold, but the water was icy. The faint rank smell of decaying vegetation lay over everything. The wind carried on it the salt smell of the sea along with the now ever-present burnt scent from the repeated firing of the Germans’ defensive antiaircraft guns. Nevertheless, Genevieve was on edge: the sounds of the marsh—the lapping of the water, the plops of creatures going in, the cry of night birds—might be, she feared, enough to keep them from hearing any pursuit until it was upon them. And, too, there was the terrifying, exciting knowledge that the Allied invasion would soon begin.

The bombing started when they still had a fair distance to go before they were safely out of the marsh. The explosions were not too close, lighting up the sky farther to the east, but they were enough to make their small party hurry.

Moving with the men behind her along the invisible ribs of solid ground, no more noticeable, she hoped, than shifting shadows in the darkness, Genevieve heard the unmistakable growl of airplanes overhead.

Cold with dread, she looked up.

It was barely past midnight on June 6, 1944. The heavy cloud cover that still plagued the area in the aftermath of the storms had parted just enough to allow a glimpse of the full moon behind it. It was immediately blotted out again by a ceiling of dark shapes passing overhead, and, below that, a sky full of—something.

“What is that?” one of the men behind her whispered. A glance told her that he, too, was craning his neck to look skyward.

“I don’t know,” another replied, equally low.

At first she thought they looked like white moths. Then mushrooms in the air.

Genevieve’s eyes widened and her lips parted as the shapes resolved into dozens of white domes swooping silently toward earth.

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