Page 60 of Shadows In Paris
The loud clang of the door resounded around the small cell. People were crammed in, leaning against the walls, fear etched on their faces in the dim light. Lizzie scanned the group, trying to understand what her connection was to the others. She didn’t see where they’d taken her in the van, but they hadn’t driven for long, so it can’t have been far. They’d hustled them into a tall building, and then shuffled them down some stone steps into this cell.
Francois must have broken under interrogation and now they were rounding up the Resistance members one by one. It was one explanation for the way she’d been hauled away so suddenly. Lizzie’s mind was jumbled with thoughts of Francois, Hannah, Phillipe, and the rest of the network. None of the people she recognised were here, so she held onto a slither of hope that they didn’t have the others.Yet.
Hannah could have been arrested at German High Command as she had feared. Perhaps they had been watching them since the failed mission and only lulled them into a false sense of security by not searching the farmhouse.
If it were an SOE operation, the agent would follow thesuspect and see where they led them. The Wehrmacht wouldn’t be trained in espionage, but the Gestapo would know how to draw out agents, so perhaps that’s what this was. But she had only seen soldiers so far, and it didn’t seem like a Gestapo arrest.
Lizzie checked her watch. It was still only mid-morning. She had the whole day to get out of there and make it to the pickup tonight. Some people were talking to each other in low voices, and Lizzie leaned closer to listen. The conversation seemed innocuous enough, and after about ten minutes of concentrated listening, she had heard nothing to make her any the wiser why they had all been detained.
‘Do you know why they brought you in?’ Lizzie asked a middle-aged smartly dressed woman who sat on a bench in the cell's corner.
‘No, I do not know. I was on the way to visit my daughter-in-law and grandchild, and they swooped in and shoved me into their truck.’
Lizzie asked some more of the detainees as discreetly as she could about what they had been doing when they were stopped. None of them sounded like they were up to anything suspicious. But then, if they asked Lizzie what she had been doing, she wouldn’t seem suspicious either. If they were agents or spies, it was their job to blend in, just like it was hers.
Studying the group surreptitiously, she couldn’t figure out what was going on. If these people were enemies of the Nazi state, they were a ramshackle lot. Some clutched onto their shopping bags, guarding their precious rations, whilst others looked terrified and barely moved.
Time trickled like treacle, and a wave of exhaustion hit Lizzie, and she slumped down to sit on the cold ground. No one showed any signs of being dangerous, and many of the detainees had dozed off on the floor or on the benches. Shecouldn’t risk falling asleep in case someone went for her papers or money, but she would rest a little. No one had come in to question them yet, and she knew no more now than when they arrived. Lizzie fought sleep, struggling to keep her eyes open. She played mental games to stay awake, like Jack had taught her.
‘There will be times when your body is beyond exhaustion and your spirit is so weary, you are desperate for sleep, but you must learn to stay awake to defend yourself.’
Lizzie ran through their wireless codes to keep her mind alert, but it was a battle to stop her eyelids from drooping. How she longed to burrow into her soft mattress in her bedroom in the Regent’s Park house. Her mother beckoned her to join the family for tea in the drawing room, and Lizzie tasted delicious crunchy toast, and her mouth watered. Her head jerked up, and she realised she had nodded off despite her best efforts. It had been a long night with little sleep. Lizzie stood and walked around the cell, avoiding sleeping bodies strewn about.
After a while, a gruff male voice called out, ‘You, mademoiselle. Sit down and stop making us all dizzy.’
Lizzie looked at the old man and apologised. ‘I am trying to stay awake in case they release us soon.’
The man snorted. ‘You are optimistic. So, you think these Nazi pigs are going to take pity on us and just let us go like that, do you?’
Lizzie approached the man, hoping to learn more about why they were here. ‘Why did they detain you?’ she asked.
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘The bastards don’t need an excuse. They run France now, God help us. Makes me wonder what we fought for in the last war.’
Lizzie thought of her mother again, and a wave of homesickness gripped her until she felt like crying. Was this how she was going to end up? Rotting in a Nazi jail, or worse?Her hand moved to her neck and her fingers touched the pendant Jack had given her. If all else failed, she would use the cyanide pill.
Hours passed, and eventually the door opened, and a soldier entered carrying a bucket. He threw some bread rolls at the prisoners, who did their best to catch them, but most rolled across the dusty floor as people scrambled to get them. Lizzie’s stomach rumbled, and she reached to claim a roll too, but they had all gone. She looked at the soldier. ‘We need more,’ she said. ‘There aren’t enough to go round.’
He spat on the floor and threw a few more up in the air. Some of the detainees were old and frail, and Lizzie didn’t want to take one before they got theirs. The soldier delighted in his power to eke them out, and he taunted her by throwing more onto the floor. Lizzie reached for one and rubbed it on her coat to dust off the dirt. ‘When do we get out of here?’ she asked him, thinking she had nothing to lose. ‘You have no reason to hold us. We are French citizens going about our business. We’ve done nothing wrong.’
Lizzie heard a woman gasp nearby.
‘There’ll be someone down to question you shortly,’ growled the soldier, who turned and left the room.
‘I would kill for some water,’ Lizzie heard someone say over the other side of the room.
Several more hours passed, and it was late afternoon by the time two soldiers entered and questioned them. The questions seemed routine, and Lizzie was even more puzzled about why they had been hauled into the truck and locked up in this cell.
By the time they turned to Lizzie, she knew what to expect.
‘What are you doing in Paris?’
Lizzie repeated her cover story, and one soldier yawned and rubbed his eyes. She saw this as a minor victory anddecided she would up the yawn factor and bore them to tears.
‘What does your sister do?’ the other one continued.
‘She is recuperating, which is why I am staying with her.’
Another yawn.
