Liberation

by Imogen Kealey

Genres: World War II; Women's Fiction; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

To the Allies she was a fearless freedom fighter, Special Operations super spy, a woman ahead of her time. To the Gestapo she was a ghost, a shadow, the most wanted person in the world with a million-franc bounty on her head. Her name was Nancy Wake. Now, for the first time, the roots of her legend are told in a thriller about one woman’s incredible quest to save the man she loves, turn the tide of the war, and take brutal revenge on those who have wronged her.

Release date: April 28, 2020

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 384

Sample

This was a bad idea. A very bad idea. Damn it.

Nancy closed her eyes for a moment as she crouched behind the remains of a blasted wall and took a deep breath. The smell of burning buildings was clawing at the back of her throat, the smoke stinging her eyes, and squeezed into her narrow hiding place her muscles were beginning to cramp. She could hear the voices of the approaching German patrol clearly now.

“Auf der linken Seite.” On the left side.

The wall she was hiding behind had yesterday been part of a house, a home. Just one of the thousands of narrow tenements in this corner of Marseille, where the city’s less respectable inhabitants had for years brawled, grifted and bargained their way from one day to the next.

Now she sheltered in the remains of a small dirty room in her second-best coat and third-best high heels. The bloody things were pinching. The cloudless winter sky was visible through the remains of the upper story, but this room had only one door. She’d made a stupid mistake when she ducked in here to avoid the German patrol. They were swaggering through the ruins while their colleagues continued the business of setting explosives higher up the hill, chasing out the former residents of the Old Quarter from their holes. Going from house to house. And this house was next. Dull crumps and the rumble of falling masonry, together with occasional bursts of gunfire echoed dryly from higher up the hill.

“They have found more rats, boys,” said an older voice, probably the officer.

“But I want a mouse,” one of his men replied, and they laughed.

Most of Nancy’s wealthy friends wouldn’t have dreamed of coming to this part of town, even before the war. Too dangerous. Too strange. On her first day in Marseille, though, five years ago, Nancy had found her way into the steep narrow streets of the Old Quarter and she had fallen for it and the sinners and drinkers and gamblers she’d found there. She loved all its angry, messed-up color and contrast and dived straight in. It was her talent for going to places she shouldn’t, of course, which meant she could earn a living as a journalist in France. And she knew that being Australian, she could get away with things most French women, so careful of their reputations, wouldn’t dream of doing. In the years since then, Nancy had moved through these twisting roads and alleyways without fear, sharing cigarettes with the corner boys and trading foul language with their bosses. Even when she got engaged to one of the richest industrialists in the city, Nancy didn’t stop going wherever the hell she liked. And it had worked out OK. When the war began and supplies started to dwindle even in Vichy territories, Nancy was already good friends with half the black marketeers in the city.

“It’s empty, Captain!”

“OK, on to the next, lads.”

Then the Nazis arrived in the city with their ugliness and casual violence, and the fiction that any part of France remained unoccupied fell apart, and then the Nazis decided the way to deal with the provocateurs, smugglers and thieves of the Old Quarter was to burn their homes to the ground and shoot anyone who didn’t make a run for it.

So crouched behind the wall, with the patrol coming ever closer, Nancy had to admit it, reluctantly, even to herself: coming here on one last mission while SS troops rooted through the rubble for survivors and escapees was a bad idea, and coming here when the one person the jack-booted sadists really wanted to find was the Resistance courier and people smuggler known as the White Mouse, and you, as well as being Miss Nancy Wake, former journalist and pampered princess of the Marseille upper crust, were the White Mouse, made it a really, really no good, not clever at all, bad idea.

Not that she’d had a choice. Every mission she went on was important, but this one was vital and had to happen today, even while the Germans tore the world to shreds around her. She’d left the luxurious villa she shared with Henri determined, slipped past the patrols, tracked down her contact, bullied the tricksy twitchy devil into holding up his side of the bargain and got what she had come for. The package was secure under her arm, wrapped in more Nazi-loving bullshit from the Vichy press. It had cost her a thousand francs and was worth every centime—if she could make it back alive.

She had to get out of here. Now. No way was she going to reach her next appointment in time if she got picked up and questioned, even if they fell for the “What me, officer? Oh, I took a wrong turn on the way back from the spa. How smart you look in that uniform. Your mother must be so proud” act. God knows she’d winked and flirted her way through plenty of checkpoints in the last two years, a dash of rouge on her lips, with secret communiqués and radio parts for the Resistance sewn into the lining of her handbag, or strapped tightly to the inside of her thigh. But she had to, had to, make that appointment.

Two men from the patrol were already in the hallway. Double damn. If she could get them out onto the street again she could make a dash through the back of the building. It was that or shooting her way out.

She reached into her handbag, fished out her revolver and wet her lips. No time to fret about it. This thing just needed doing. She lifted her head and peered over the edge of the shattered window frame and looked right and left along the street. The house on the other side of the road and to the east still had parts of its second floor standing. Somebody being stingy with the TNT. Nancy could see a table, a vase placed carefully at its center in a room which no longer had walls or ceiling. The single blown rose it held shifted in the breeze made by the sucking currents of the fire. Excellent.

Nancy snapped open the cylinder of her revolver and emptied the bullets into her palm, then hurled them overarm across and along the narrow street. One of the soldiers on the street twisted round with a frown, sensing movement. Nancy flattened herself against the wall again and held her breath. One. Two. Then a sudden crack as the fire found the first bullet, then another.

“Return fire!”

The two soldiers in the hallway turned back out into the street and started firing into the burning building. Nancy could smell the cordite on their clothes as she slipped out of the room and made a dash for the back of the house. The patrol was still firing at ghosts. She pushed open the back door, ran through the narrow, rubble-strewn yard and plunged into the maze of nameless back lanes until she tumbled out into the relative peace of Rue de Bon Pasteur. Empty. She ran straight down the hill with a whoop of victory, her package still under her arm, and one gloved hand holding her elegant straw hat in place, trying hard not to laugh and skidding into the square like a kid freewheeling on a bicycle.

Straight into another patrol. Or almost. They had their backs to her. She threw herself back against the nearest wall and inched slightly up the hill. From the upper window of a house opposite a cat watched her, and blinked.

Nancy looked up at it and held her finger to her lips, hoping the creature couldn’t tell at this distance that she was more of a dog person. Two feet east of her she saw the shadow of an opening in the blank and empty street. An alley, hardly big enough to walk down and silted up with God knew what rubbish.

She reached it and slipped in sideways, trying not to let her coat touch the walls, which looked suspiciously greasy. So did the cobbles beneath her feet. God, the smell. Even the drains of the fish market in mid-summer didn’t stink like this. She breathed through her mouth, deafened by the thud of her own heart. She hoped her maid would be able to save her shoes, even if they did pinch. She could hear the voices of the patrol again. They had grabbed hold of some poor bugger, and she listened to them yelling at him, and his softer replies. He sounded desperate, afraid.

“Don’t show them you’re scared, mate,” she whispered between clenched teeth. “It just gets their blood up.”

“To your knees!”

Not good. Nancy looked up at the narrow strip of bright blue sky above her and prayed. Not that she believed in God, but maybe the Frenchman did, or the German with a gun. How many people were hiding in the houses around them now, listening but too frightened to move? Maybe they were praying too. Maybe that would make a difference. Maybe not.

She heard the click of a rifle bolt being slid into position, then a yell and running feet coming up the hill toward her hiding place. The idiot was trying to make a break for it. The crack of the shot echoed off the high walls. She heard the guttural gasp, very close, as the bullet hit, and looked sideways in time to see him fall, arms out in front of him, parallel with her hiding place in the middle of the steep cobbled road. His face was turned toward her. Christ, he was just a kid. Eighteen at most. She stared at him and it seemed he saw her. His skin was the smooth olive of a boy born under the Marseille sun, deep brown eyes, high cheekbones. He had on the collarless linen shirt all the working men of the area wore, thin with washing but kept blindingly white by a devoted mother. Lord, his mother. Where was she? The blood was pooling under his chest, and trickling down the slope between the high curved stones. His lips were moving, as if he was trying to whisper some secret to her. Then her view of his face was blocked by the boots of a German soldier. He looked back toward the square and shouted something Nancy didn’t catch. A short reply.

The soldier unslung his rifle from his shoulder, worked the bolt and lifted it. He took a half step back so Nancy could see the lad’s face again. The world narrowed to this patch of cobbled road, the yellow plaster wall opposite startled with sunlight, the movement of the dying boy’s lips. Crack! Blood and brain matter fountained across the road. His body twitched and went still, the light in his eyes suddenly, absolutely extinguished.

Nancy felt a plume of rage lift through her. Lawless, murderous bastards. She put her hand in her purse and closed her hand around her revolver, before remembering with a bitter lurch that it was empty.

“Ah, shit!” the soldier said quietly, wiping away a smear of blood from the edge of his tunic. He’d been standing too close. He’d know better next time. He looked up at the window where the cat had been, then right and left along the street. Nancy had nowhere to go. One moment more and he would see her and there was nothing she could do, and if she couldn’t kill him she’d have to talk her way out of it. She began to prepare her excuses and blandishments. Should she play the frightened girl? Or perhaps the outraged French housewife, intimidating even the SS with talk of her husband’s wealth, her high-ranking friends? Attack can be the best form of defense. Just to scream in his face would be a pleasure, even if it got her shot in the end.

Another shout from the square and the soldier turned away. He walked back down the hill, slinging his rifle over his shoulder and leaving the White Mouse, shaking with rage, in her hiding place.

She had to wait, so she counted to fifty and watched the dead man’s face. One. Hitler speaking in Berlin, Nancy standing in a small group of journalists, not understanding the words but feeling the wild, ugly enthusiasm of the crowd. She had glanced round at her friends, all foreign correspondents based like her in Paris, all like her in Germany to see for themselves what this funny little man was up to. They were to a man older and much more experienced than she was, but they looked, all of them, as scared and sickened as she felt. Two. Vienna, thugs in the brown shirts of the Sturmabteilung, smashing the windows of Jewish businesses, dragging the owners out into the streets by their hair and whipping them in front of their neighbors; the neighbors turning away; the neighbors laughing and applauding. Three. Poland invaded, the declaration of war and the months of waiting which followed. Four. Cramming refugees into her ambulance as France fell. Five. German fighters strafing the lines of fleeing women and children with machine-gun fire. Six. Henri returning from his stint at the front heart-sore and humiliated by the speed of France’s defeat. Seven. The day that Paris fell.

The images came in an orderly procession. Nancy clenched her fists. She’d sworn on that day in Vienna that if she ever had any chance to do the Nazis harm she’d take it, and everything she’d been through since only strengthened that conviction. She fed off her hatred for them. She delighted in every tiny victory. She believed that Hitler was a mad man, and that smashing himself on the great rock of Russia would end him. She would do anything she could to bring the collapse of his vicious, hate-filled regime a moment closer. She knew she was supposed to be afraid, stay quiet, keep out of trouble, and wait until Hitler and his foul crew imploded, but she was too angry to be afraid, and she didn’t hold with keeping quiet.

Fifty. This man. This boy, caught up in the occupation and destruction of the Old Quarter of Marseille casually murdered by an invader with a rifle. The light leaving his eyes. Nancy stepped back out into the street and walked down to the market place without looking at the corpse. She would never forget him. She unlocked her bicycle from the railings by the water fountain and, putting her package in its wicker basket, wheeled it out of the quarter.

When she reached the seafront, the glittering Mediterranean jewel-like under the cool winter skies, she took off her glove, leaned forward and ran her perfectly manicured nail down the edge of the newspaper wrapping, slicing it open, neat as a knife. The package held a bottle of Krug 1928, the champagne and the vintage Henri had ordered the night they first met in Cannes. Nancy turned the parcel so the tear wouldn’t show and pushed off on her bicycle toward the smart end of town, where Henri and she had lived together since war broke out. The shock of seeing the man die was fading now. She lifted her face to the sun and let the breeze cool her skin. Damn the Germans. As the White Mouse the Germans had already put a price of a hundred thousand francs on her head, so she must be doing something right. A hundred black-market bottles of excellent champagne. She’d drink to that, but now she was going home to dress for her wedding.

Henri Fiocca was watching from the window of his dressing room as Nancy came up the path. He felt his heart lift and the familiar sensations of wonderment, fear and anger. Even on her wedding day she had to head off on some mission. Letters for the Resistance probably, false papers for another refugee desperate to leave France, radio parts for Resistance cells in Marseille itself, Cannes, Toulouse. Nancy was always on a train risking her life to take money and messages to some shadowy friend of a friend. He hated that. The loose, improvised nature of the Resistance network forced her to trust strangers, and these days one couldn’t trust one’s own family. Henri was a patriot—he loathed the Germans with a white-hot rage which equaled Nancy’s, and so he shared his wealth and his table with anyone who could do the enemy harm. But he still wished to God he did not have to share his wife-to-be with them. Nancy seemed to have been born without fear, but Henri knew what fear was. His love for her had taught him that lesson.

He put his hand on the window pane as she disappeared into the house and said her name under his breath. She had blazed into his life like a meteor, this girl, and scattered light and magic and chaos in equal measure in her wake. He had fallen in love with her at once, absolutely, the first night they met. It had been like stepping off a cliff edge and into the shocking embrace of the ocean, but he was unsure what she wanted from him. He was so much older than her, and his life, for all its luxury, was so dull compared to hers. After a year he discovered she didn’t care about his money. Oh, she enjoyed spending it, just as she enjoyed every fresh pleasure she could find, but she did it with the delight of a child. Slowly, he learned about Nancy’s early miserable years and her flight from Australia to America and London at sixteen; her desperation to put an ocean, half a world, between herself and that unhappy childhood had turned into an animal appetite for pleasure and a fierce self-reliance. After another year, Henri realized that even Nancy needed someone to lean on from time to time and she had chosen him.

She had chosen him.

Pride flared in his chest.

Tonight, he would be able to call her his wife. He knew she wouldn’t stop draining his wealth and running insane risks to help the Resistance just by marrying him—he had no illusions about that—but today and tonight at least, he would know where she was, know she was his own.

“Perhaps I should talk to Nancy,” a voice behind him said, narrow and nasal. “If she can’t be on time for her hairdresser on her wedding day, maybe she doesn’t even want to get married.”

Henri looked over his shoulder. His sister was perched on the edge of his bed like an elderly crane. She had been a pretty girl when she was young, even with that long face and thin lips, but somehow even with all her wealth she had managed to turn sour, and that, he believed, had made her ugly. She had insisted on accompanying him upstairs when he’d said he was going to dress, desperate to make one last attempt to get him to call off the wedding.

“You may try if you wish, Gabrielle. But she will just tell you to go away and leave her alone. And remember she is not constrained by brotherly love. I may not throw you out of the room, but she will.”

Gabrielle ignored the hint, broad as it was. Her voice continued, high and whining as a mosquito. “I will say this for her, she can curse in French like a sailor in the last hour of his shore leave. Where on earth did she learn such language, Henri? It’s disgusting.”

Henri smiled. Hearing Nancy let rip in her adopted language was one of the great pleasures of his life.

“She is a natural linguist, Gabrielle.”

“Stuff! No dowry! She refuses to become a Catholic! Does she even believe in God?”

“I doubt it.”

The whine pitched a little higher. “How could you, Henri, how could you pollute our family with this foul little Australian whore?”

That was too far; even brotherly love had its limits. Henri lifted his sister by her shoulders off his bed and propelled her firmly toward the door.

“Gabrielle, speak to me of my wife in that manner once more, and you will not set foot in my house again. If I had to trade my money, my business, my dear family for an hour of Nancy’s company in the lowest bar in Montmartre I would do it without a moment’s hesitation. Now get out.”

Gabrielle realized that she had gone too far and her tone became beseeching. “I am thinking only of you, Henri,” she managed as he shut the door in her face.

Thank God she does not know about Nancy’s work for the Resistance, Henri thought. She would go tip-tapping her way to the Gestapo in an instant, a mix of hatred of Nancy and greed for the reward making her eager to bloody her claws.

He returned to the mirror and smoothed down his hair. His friends told him he was looking younger since the war had begun. He didn’t want to tell them it was just that they were aging at a faster rate. He didn’t want to offend them, loyal as they were in their way to their own wives, by pointing out that Nancy, a teenaged runaway from the other side of the world, had given him purpose and hope while they staggered with shock at the defeat of France, the flight of the British soldiers from Dunkirk and then the horrific bombing of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir on the coast of French Algeria, ordered by none other than Churchill himself. Over a thousand Frenchmen killed by British bombs. That had shaken his country-men, and so many had retreated into their homes in the face of it that the Germans now thought that they owned the whole country. They did not. France would rise in the end. Nancy made him believe that. What would life without her have been like? He shivered. Hellish, gray.

And then of course Nancy also seemed to be best friends with every black-market operator on the Riviera. Their table was always laden with fresh meat, and so they shared with their friends who had neither connections nor money. Henri did not think he’d eaten a meal alone with Nancy in their home for a year.

He heard a tap at the door.

“What?” he said gruffly, thinking his sister might have gathered her courage for one last assault.

Nancy slid in like a cat. She could only have been in the house for ten minutes, yet there she was, her hair curled and piled high to frame her heart-shaped face, her full lips cherry red against her white powdered skin, her blue dress sweeping and skimming over the full curves of her breasts and hips.

“Is that how you’ll greet me every time I knock on your dressing-room door from now on, Henri?”

He walked toward her, a glimmer in his eyes, but she held up her hand.

“Don’t disarrange me, you monster! I just wanted you to know I’m all ready to be made an honest woman, if Gabrielle didn’t put you off.” She winked. “Though I just spotted her sniffing into her hanky in the hall downstairs, so I guess she failed.”

He put his hands on her hips, feeling the blue silk of her dress move over her skin, but did not try to kiss her.

“How could you go out today, Nancy? In the middle of all this hell. On our wedding day?”

She put her hand up to his cheek. “I’m sorry, but don’t growl at me, Old Bear. It was important, to me at least. I’m home now.”

“Have you seen the new posters, offering one hundred thousand for the White Mouse? It seems your stunt breaking out the prisoners from Puget has not gone unnoticed.”

“Worth it,” she said, gently removing his hands from her hips before his grip did damage to the delicate—and extremely expensive—silk. “Those men can do something now. Though that British airman was an arse. Complaining about his food and how cramped the safe house was like we hadn’t all just risked a firing squad to save his sorry butt.”

Henri took a step away from her. Gabrielle was always talking about the other women he could have chosen to be his wife, beautiful, elegant, obedient, French girls. They would have kept careful accounts, stayed quietly at home. But every other woman in the world disappeared when he thought of Nancy. The fire of her, her brutal tongue. The refusal to be cowed. She went up against the world toe-to-toe like a prize fighter. The clash of images in his mind, the bruised hulk of a boxer, and this beautiful young woman in blue silk and red lipstick made him laugh and she looked at him quizzically.

“White Mouse is a bad name for you, Nancy. You are a lion. Now, shall we marry?”

He shrugged on his dinner jacket, and she came close to him again to adjust his tie. He caught the scent of Chanel on her warm skin.

“Yes, Monsieur Fiocca. We shall.”

The party at the Hotel du Louvre et Paix was a complete triumph. Not even the sour stares of Henri’s family could chip away at the perfectly joyous victory of the thing. If anyone wondered how the new Madame Fiocca had managed to get her hands on such a profusion of luxuries, they kept their doubts to themselves and launched themselves headlong into the serious business of pleasure.

Nancy was fiercely happy. She knew that the party would be the talk of the city and that she had done Henri proud. Every hour spent debating and arguing with chefs, florists and dressmakers had been worth it. Take that, Marseille. She slipped her hand into his under the table at the head of the gilded ballroom. He was turned away from her, trading jokes with one of his managers at the shipworks, but he squeezed the tips of her fingers and rubbed the inside of her palm with his thumb in a way that made her shiver.

“Madame Fiocca,” said a voice at her elbow. It was Bernard, maître d’ of the hotel and one of Nancy’s favorite friends. He stepped back to allow one of his underlings to set the silver ice bucket at her elbow and fresh glasses in front of Nancy and Henri, then lifted the chilled bottle out of the ice, showed it to her, and at her nod opened it. It sighed open under his practiced hand and he poured for them both.

Henri turned from his friend, saw the label and vintage, and laughed out loud. “How did you manage this, Nancy?”

“I told you I was on a very important mission today, Old Bear.”

He shook his head, but took his glass from Bernard with a reluctant smile on his lips.

She got to her feet and tapped her full glass with a fork. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Gabrielle, sitting with her equally unfriendly father, Claude, stiffen. A bride giving a toast at the wedding? Shocking! Hell yes, Nancy was going to give a toast.

She waved her hands in the air. “Quiet now, you devils!”

The band leader cut off his musicians in full flight and Nancy’s friends silenced each other in a chorus of shushes and giggles. Nancy lifted her glass.

“Thank you! Now, my father couldn’t be here today, but he sends his regards from Sydney.” Nancy was guessing on that one. She hadn’t seen him since she was five. “And my mother wasn’t invited, which if you knew her, you’d realize was my present to all of you.” That mean cramped woman in her mean cramped house, a Bible in one hand and her stick in the other. Let her rot. “So I shall try and give a proper toast of my own. I am toasting my husband this evening”—she paused for cheers and whistles—“with a 1928 Krug, because that was the vintage he ordered the night we met, when France was still free. But war or not, Nazis in our streets or not, I say to you this evening, while we are free in our hearts, France is still free. Henri, I know I am a difficult, expensive, troublesome sort of wife to have, but you are my rock and together we will build a life worthy of this vintage. I swear it.”

Henri got to his feet and touched his glass to hers and for a moment, as their eyes met, they were the only people in the world.

“Madame Fiocca,” Henri said, and sipped his champagne.

Someone in the crowd sighed loudly and even Nancy felt the prick of sentimental tears behind her eyes. No. Tonight was a party.

“To hell with propriety,” she said, and drained her glass, then turned and gave her audience her best, her widest, her most impossible-to-resist smile.

They cheered, a full-throated roar of delight and defiance. The band leader caught his cue and launched into a fast-paced version of “When the Saints go Marching In.” The waiters began to clear tables and move them out of the way for the dancing to begin, helped with stumbling enthusiasm by Nancy’s most disreputable friends.

Henri set his glass on the table and kissed her. Out of the corner of her eye Nancy noticed Gabrielle dabbing at her eyes with a linen handkerchief, and so she kissed him back, hard, and tipped herself forward into his arms like a swooning Hollywood star. The applause and whoops were loud enough to be heard up and down the seafront.

It was another hour before Nancy had the chance to talk to Philippe and Antoine about what she had seen during the destruction of the Old Quarter.

Antoine, dark-haired and thin but with a wiry strength in his narrow shoulders, was one of the most successful people smugglers in the south. He’d worked with Nancy, a Scotsman named Garrow she had never met and a Belgian Resistance man called O’Leary, all of them guiding escapees to isolated safe houses and arranging gu. . .