The Lost Girls of Paris: A Novel

When Grace returns from Washington, D.C., she is surprised to find her mother waiting in her apartment. Grace hasn’t seen her mother since the funeral of her husband, Tom. Grace’s mother tries to convince Grace to come back to her hometown. When Grace resists, her mother expresses her support and leaves an envelope containing a check for $10,000 from Tom’s estate.

The following Monday, Grace goes to the British consulate to drop off the photographs, believing that she has discovered the truth of Eleanor’s treachery. Since Grace’s last visit to the consulate, the police have delivered the other items that Eleanor had with her at the time of the accident. The receptionist allows Grace to look at the items. Grace sees that Eleanor has stamps in her passport from Germany and France in the weeks leading up to her arrival in New York. Grace keeps only Josie’s picture as “a souvenir from the journey she had never expected” (276).

It is now January 1946, nearly two years since Eleanor was fired from the SOE. A car arrives unexpectedly at Eleanor’s house to take her to SOE headquarters. The war is over, but the London streets are still bleak. As the car rounds a bend, she sees that the building where she’d worked for the SOE has been destroyed in a fire. The car drops her at the other SOE building, 64 Baker Street.

Eleanor meets with the Director. When she asks about the 12 missing girls, he shows her a list of seven who have been confirmed dead in Nazi concentration camps. The rest have been given the official designation of “Missing” and “Presumed dead.” In the years since she was fired, Eleanor has continued her search for the missing agents, using her contacts in government agencies and reviewing public records. She has also spoken with the women’s families.

The Director tells Eleanor that one of the agent’s families is asking questions and has submitted a formal complaint to the government. The Director wants Eleanor to travel to France to track down information about what happened to the women. He also claims to suspect that someone caused the fire to prevent the SOE files from reaching a parliamentary investigation about the network. (The narrative will later reveal that the Director’s words are a ruse, as he is really the one who started the fire.)

Driven by her long-time desire to understand what happened to “the girls,” Eleanor agrees to go. After leaving the Director, she walks to the burned-down building and descends to the cellar where her office had been. In the back of a metal filing cabinet is a metal box filled with all the keepsakes that she has held for her agents. She retrieves the box.

Three weeks after her conversation with the Director, Eleanor is in Paris. She is struggling to track down any information about the agents because the Germans destroyed their records as they left France. After a fruitless week in Paris, she makes plans to rent a car and travel into the villages and towns where the agents were active. At her hotel on the night before her departure, a man named Henri Duquet seeks Eleanor out. He was part of the French resistance during the war and heard Eleanor making inquiries at the government ministry where he works. Henri takes Eleanor to the building that was formerly the German intelligence headquarters on Avenue Foch. Inside, Eleanor sees one of the SOE radios. Henri confirms that the leak began with an agent in Marseilles and then spread to other networks. When she asks how the German soldiers were able to impersonate agents, Henri answers, “Some of the crystals overlapped in frequency. And the ciphers do not appear to have been unique” (293). He doesn’t know how the Germans succeeded without the agents’ security checks.

Henri confirms that Julian was shot. He thinks that Marie and other agents were taken to Fresnes prison and then to a concentration camp. Eleanor sees the room where Julian and Marie were kept and wonders if Marie tried to leave a clue about what happened. Searching the inscriptions carved onto the bed frames, Eleanor sees the word Baudelaire in Marie’s familiar handwriting. In a collection of poetry on the room’s bookshelf, Eleanor finds the letters L-O-N-D-O-N circled in a Baudelaire poem. To Eleanor, this feels like an accusation, as though Marie realized that someone in London betrayed them. Henri echoes the accusation, telling Eleanor that the agents needed help and that the Germans were broadcasting on the radios with such abandon that London should have realized it. Henri wonders aloud if Eleanor could have been the traitor. Hurt by the accusation and realizing that the signs point to a betrayal from within SOE headquarters, Eleanor rushes out. She decides to go to Germany, where Hans Kriegler, head of the German intelligence agency, is soon to be put on trial for war crimes.

Marie wakes on the floor in Fresnes prison, which is located on the outskirts of Paris. (Here, the Nazis held and executed many members of the SOE and the French resistance during their occupation of France.) Marie has been imprisoned for almost a month. During that time, the Allies invaded France and are making slow progress toward Paris. As shouts in German ring out along the prison hallways, Marie realizes that the Nazis are emptying the prison before the Allies arrive.

Many of the women in Marie’s large, shared cell are members of the French resistance and have been imprisoned for longer than she. They are starved and weak and are covered in bedbugs and wounds. In the commotion, Marie’s fellow prisoners slip notes out the small prison window; this is their last attempt to contact the outside world. The German guards herd the prisoners out of the cells. In the crush, Marie trips over a woman and bends down to help her up. The woman is Josie. She is so weak that she can hardly move. Marie supports her as they move into a waiting truck.

The women are taken to the train station and loaded into overcrowded boxcars. The conditions are cruel; water and food are provided only once. Without other options, the women relieve themselves where they are standing. Josie has a high fever but manages to tell Marie about her capture. The Germans had been waiting for her when she arrived at a scheduled meeting with the French resistance. They had known her name and her family history. It breaks Marie’s heart to see Josie so hopeless and so near death.

Explosions shake the train. Their car leans sharply to one side. German soldiers open the car doors and order the prisoners out. Marie sees that the track has been destroyed. Josie doesn’t move, and Marie refuses to leave her friend behind. The soldiers notice them in the now-empty train car and attempt to force the women out, kicking both women. Marie shields Josie’s body with her own. Josie indicates that Marie should run; Josie has somehow smuggled a grenade into prison, and now she pulls the pin. Marie leaps for the door of the train as Josie and the German soldiers vanish in the explosion.

Eleanor arrives in Munich, Germany. She is amazed by the extent of the destruction; buildings are bombed-out rubble for as far as she can see. Eleanor had opted not to tell the Director that she was going to Germany, and this means that she has no official status or special access to the war tribunal proceedings. Eleanor heads to Dachau, the former concentration camp that is now under investigation by the war crimes tribunal. Eleanor is delayed at the gate because of her lack of official paperwork. There, she meets US Army Major Mick Willis, who was a “Nazi hunter” during the war and is now helping the team prepare for the trials.

Mick won’t let Eleanor speak with Kriegler because the head prosecutor has forbidden it, but he offers her lodging for the night. They eat dinner together in the mess hall, and Mick tells Eleanor that some German soldiers and other witnesses mentioned female SOE agents. He shows her a witness testimony from a forced laborer at Dachau. The testimony describes three women who linked arms when they were brought into the camp. They weren’t registered in the barracks like all the other prisoners. Instead, they were immediately administered lethal injections.

Mick admires Eleanor’s dedication to her agents but tells her they can’t interfere with  Kriegler’s trial; he is charged with killing many, many people. Eleanor realizes that they are struggling to get Kriegler to talk and do not have enough hard evidence to convict him. She pushes this point, promising Mick that she can get Kriegler to talk if he will let her have a private interview. Mick sneaks her in to see Kriegler early the next morning.

When Eleanor introduces herself, Kriegler recognizes her name and knows her role. She shows him photos of the women, and he recognizes Marie. He tells Eleanor that Marie was sent to Fresnes after he shot Julian. Kriegler confirms that they obtained a radio from the network in the south of France and experimented with different frequencies until they found one used by the Vesper network. They were then able to impersonate Marie. They managed without the security checks because someone in London wanted them to succeed. Kriegler references the message that a “cocky” German soldier sent, thanking the Brits for their help; this is the message that Grace later discovers in the files in the Pentagon.

Hoping that she will argue for a life sentence for him rather than execution, Kriegler gives Eleanor a key to a security box in a Swiss bank. Kriegler mentions that he sent five SOE women to Fresnes in the spring of 1944. One, Josie, died in a train car explosion. The witness account confirms three arriving at Dachau. This leaves one unaccounted for, and Eleanor begins to hope that Marie is alive.