The Cost of Courage Read Free Page B

de Chaillot is one of the largest concert halls in Paris.
    Now the train is rumbling out of its underground tunnel to travel over the Seine, to Passy. Just one more stop to go. Then it dives back underground to pull into Trocadéro.
    Jacqueline knows every inch of this station: It is the one she grew up with, the one closest to her parents’ apartment.
    She runs toward the exit for Palais de Chaillot. Now she is dashing past the statues of Apollo and Hercules, still carrying her groceries. As she enters the lobby, she can just make out the sounds of Bach still seeping out of the hall.
    I haven’t missed the end of the performance!
    But how will she ever be able to snatch Christiane out of the crowd?
    Happy accident? Or intuition?
    To the end of her life, Christiane will never be able to answer that question. Before today, she has never left a concert early. But this afternoon, something suddenly makes her stand up to leave the hall —
ten minutes before the concert has ended!
    When she reaches the empty lobby, she walks straight into the arms of her frantic sister.
    “We can’t leave by the front door!”
    That is Jacqueline’s only greeting: She thinks that the Gestapo may have followed her here.
    Deciding that they have nothing left to lose, they approach the box office.
    Jacqueline tells the ticket seller that she needs to speak to the manager. He may betray them, but they see no other choice.
    When the manager appears, Jacqueline exclaims, “We can’t leave by the front door.” Nothing more.
    The manager looks at her silently, his face revealing nothing.
    Now he will save them … or turn them over to the Germans.
    He turns around and walks out of the box office.
    Then he leads the terrified (but still very attractive) young women to the stage door.
    Jacqueline repays his kindness by thrusting the groceries and the bottle of wine she has carried halfway across Paris into his hands. They will only slow them down now anyway. Outside, they scour the street for Gestapo men, but no one looks particularly menacing.
    BACK ON THE MÉTRO PLATFORM at Trocadéro, Christiane tells her sister she has another problem: She is carrying dozens of coded telegrams in her purse, having spent most of the day retrieving them from secret drop-off points all across Paris. Just three days earlier, André had finally managed to open a direct communications link to his handlers in London.
    Christiane never considers throwing away the incriminating cables; she must find somewhere to hide them. She settles on the apartment building of a sympathetic cousin, who lives on avenue Marceau. When they get there, Christiane runs inside and shoves the telegrams under the carpet in the elevator cabin. Without telling her cousin, of course. Later, she will retrieve them, after the immediate danger has passed.
    By now it is after eight o’clock, and the sisters have no idea whether André, or anyone else, has been arrested. They decide to return to the Glacière Métro stop. They think they might still catch their brother before he returns to the secret apartment, so they plant themselves at the station’s two exits.
    Then they stay there until the last Métro.
    Exhausted and depressed, they finally return to their parents’ apartment across the Seine, which is where they are still living, right next to the Palais de Chaillot. Fortunately, their parents are asleep, so they don’t have to decide whether they should tell them anything right away about what has happened.
    *  Of the seven other men on the plane, one would be arrested eight days later, another was shot, and a third would die in a German concentration camp.
    †  A renegade is certainly what de Gaulle was considered when he left France in 1940, “when Vichy dominated the climate of opinion” and Germany’s collaborators argued that to “remain in France was itself proof of honor,” as Ian Ousby put it. “To go to Britain and accept British favors made the desertion far worse.”