Sainte-Come-Du-Mont, Normandy, France

D-Day plus 4

Eris

For all their appreciation for my assistance on the night of Operation Overlord, or as they began to call it D-Day, it seemed that the Airborne had little use for me. They had their own explosives to dispose of anti-aircraft and with the sun shining down on their helmeted heads, they had no need for my guidance at night. 2nd Battalion had no use for me now and I was but a passenger on their trail to the south.

On D-day plus two, they took Sainte-Come-Du-Mont, a town I knew little about other than a few contacts merely by name. There we were told to stay as watchdogs to the regimental HQ that Sink established in the largest home, making it vacant in a matter of minutes. Here, we would stay for the next three days as the Allied forces pushed on.

For the men of Easy, Fox, and Dog company of 2nd Battalion, they seemed more than content with the moment of respite. The trek through the flooded fields and wasted towns had been a long one, even if I had been given the rear of the group. Three days meant they could loot, pillage, and rest.

My perch was the steps of the church, a nest safely removed from the bustle of the occupying forces. The hobnail bootprints of the Germans were still fresh in the mud but the Americans might as well have won the war. They paraded the village with pomp and vigor that made me sick, showing their prizes to their peers.

I had spent my formative years in the company of rough men and soldier types. With my father's work in the Bureau of Prohibition and my own mother's taste of adventure, it attracted a certain type of person. I could see glimpses of them in the men of Easy Company. The drag and puff of cigarettes with a swagger that only men who had faced death and won could muster. The heartless approach to the bodies around them, German or American. Anything was fair game to Easy Company.

I watched as the paratrooper, Liebgott's thin shoulders shook with triumphant laughter as he showed his prizes: rings stolen from the fingers of dead Germans. I didn't pity the SS. God knows I had done my fair share of destruction, adding to the death toll. I wasn't proud of it though.

The possessions that I had kept concealed in that lockbox against Felix's and my own better judgment had been removed in lieu of my new position in the American army. The charm that my mother had strung around my neck to ward off the evil spirits and the ghosts of her own past was tucked neatly into my shirtfront, the chain hidden by the collar of my neck and the blue hamsa cold against the skin of my sternum. The one intangible protection my mother had provided. I carried her with me, in my mind and now, chained around my neck.

My father's lighter had been the one memory he had shared with me of his time on the front. In the deep ruts between enemy and wasteland, even the barest pinprick of light would give away a position but the soldiers still dared. Shored down in the mud among trench rats, he would pass around the lighter. Carved with his initials, a gift from my grandmother.

I knew more about my father's life before and after the war. The little house in the mountains, the memories of his mother and sister who were lost in the Spanish Flu, and the harrowing journey (his words, not mine) to Chicago where he met my mother on a liquor bust. He wanted to spare me the desolation and shellshock he had seen and faced. He had wanted me to live in a kinder world. He had prayed that the war would leave me unmarked. Miriam didn't bother offering wasted breath in prayer. She sought to prepare me to face her own prowling demons.

In reality, my mother was the reason I was still alive, however hard it was to admit it.

The paratroopers laughed and joked over the spoils of men who had died following their orders. If the men didn't trust faceless agents how long would it be before I was turned against? I was just following orders, same as the rest of us in this war. If I died here, how long would it be before the men of Easy had rifled through my possessions, claiming my pieces of home as a prize?

well, I had never been one to follow orders, not if I could help it.

Standing up, I brushed the dust off my trousers and slipped between the plots of graves and monuments that marred the churchyard, letting myself out the side gate. I had to prove my value to the Airborne, not just for survival but to stave off the boredom that crept through my bones. Three days in the same city without orders of my own to disregard. What was a girl to do?

The Normandy countryside was riddled with informants, contacts, and resistance sympathizers. If I could find one or two that I recognized or in Simone's, I might have an edge on American intelligence. Funny, I thought, we are all fighting the same war, and yet here I was, trying to one-up my fellow countrymen. You didn't have to be loyal to be useful.

I racked my brain as I strode through the side streets, dodging American soldiers. To them, I was just a local who had hidden like a frightened mouse. Sometimes it was nice to be overlooked. Easy Company had been informed of an intelligence informant joining their ranks but keeping a low profile was easier than I had anticipated. They assumed I was some nurse or volunteer guide or, better yet, didn't acknowledge me at all. I had been presented to the officers but their own enthusiasm at my company hadn't been vibrant. I chose to take their thin mouths and terse nods as a compliment. They wouldn't help me in this quest. I had to use my own years of experience to find someone in this blasted and shelled village to help me.

Who did I know in Saint-Come-Du-Mont?

In my time in Normandy, I had been handed the reins to a network that was knitted and stitched together by Simone and an SOE operative who was stationed in Paris. Nearly seventeen contacts in the nearby communes and villages and every single one were of value. Simone remembered them better than I, orchestrating meetings and messages. I was an outsider but Simone had been a local. Sometimes being an imposter was more trouble than it was worth.

Twisting a curl around my finger, I thought hard. The few times I had left my little corner of Normandy, venturing south along the paths that Easy Company were now trekking, I had met many creatures in Simone's pocket. There had been one...what was his name? He had been injured in the Great War, leaving him with a wound in his right foot. He had been known to limp with the assistance of his cane through the streets. I had always listened for his gait, alerting me of who I was to meet.

Achille. That was his name, or at least, the name I knew him by. He was a bookkeeper, giving up his files and his ledgers as transcriptions for the Resistance and had been a fruitful informant to the Resistance and the OSS. But was he still in the village or had the siege sent him running as many of the other locals had done?

There was only one way to find out.

From my memory, his little bookbinding shop was tucked between a shoe store and a long hallway that promised cramped apartments and rooms for rent somewhere near the heart of the village. The roof boasted his pigeons, a flock of the gray feathered creatures that were willing messengers. I had always been instructed to walk with a purpose, my bicycle's basket concealing in its false bottom some information or waiting for its new load.

Pausing before the gate to the churchyard, I turned my head to the right, making sure none of the paratroopers was looking at me. It was a wasted movement but a practiced one. After so many months of hurried glances over my shoulder and breathless pauses around corners to ensure that I wasn't being followed it was almost disappointing that Easy Company didn't pay me the least bit of attention. To have your own countrymen not give you the time of day was a new personal low, I had to admit.

The gate creaked, its hinges rusted and warped after years of use. My feet were soft on the stone road despite the weight of my American boots. I wasn't afraid of being followed anymore but the caution that had been drilled into me in training and in the field was still heavy on my mind.

The rubble of occupation had muddled my memory, making it difficult but not impossible to find Achille's store. I didn't have a bike or a purpose to hide behind, just personal gain. Would he even help me?

Achille had been a great informant, far greater than I could have ever dreamed of being. His limp only added to his skill. Easily underestimated and chronically ignored, he had slipped valuable information between Paris and my position with the help of his feathered messengers. When I, a younger more foolish agent, had asked why he used pigeons to send messages he had smirked.

"In Paris, they are vermin. Why would you expect a pest to hold secrets?"

Whether it was a connection between me and the fowl, Achille would refer to me as a little pest. I chose to naively believe it was an affectionate nickname though I knew from Simone that French operatives and informants didn't enjoy or welcome orders or demands from agencies, much less their willing puppets.

The street was much like I remembered from my last visit, some seven weeks before. There were holes in the storefronts, broken glass mixing with dust and bullet shells. The doors were broken in, varying states of splintered and leaning. I stepped over the shoe store's once-beautiful carved oak door, the sign welcoming customers shredding beneath my foot.

Achille's door was still upright, at least, leaning heavily against the doorframe in an exhausted slump as if someone couldn't be bothered to move it out of the way entirely. I stepped through the space between the splintered wood, calling. "Bonjour,"

The bell, that had previously hung at the top of the door, had fallen to the dust cover floor and twinkled dimly against my booted foot. Feathers and bits of torn-up paper littered the main room, a nest of secrets and tomes overturned and disgruntled.

"Little Irene, how you've grown," Achille stood behind the counter, or what was left of it. I usually found him there, with glue-sticky fingers and a half-bothered scowl as he bent over his work. Instead of a book in need of repair, he nursed a glass of amber liquid before him.

"Don't scare the ladies," Achille said, gesturing to his cooing accomplices that settled in the rubble, not at all fazed by the dust and broken glass. They rustled their feathers at me as I picked my way towards the counter.

"Hello, Achille," I said, making it safely to the counter without disturbing a single bird. It had only been seven weeks. I studied myself in the looking glass that hung shattered behind him. My reflection didn't look altered. I didn't look any different to myself. My father's eyes were still staring back at me under my mother's untamable dark hair. I still looked like Virginia, didn't I?

"Little pest has come to sniff around again?" Achille grimaced, shifting off his bad leg. "I hear they call you a snake."

"Do they?" Nixon had said something along those lines. I hadn't tried to fight for a name or a reputation but if I could instill fear, was that really such a bad thing?

"The german swine have been warning their soldiers to look out for the 'Serpent of Normandy'," Achille looked her up and down. "That's a little too long of a name for the little grass snake in my garden shed."

I rolled my eyes. The Germans could fear me but that didn't mean the Americans or even the French would respect me.

"I'm with the Americans now, Achille," I said. "I need to know where the swine are out to pasture."

"There are a few barns that I know of," Achille pursed his lips. He had helped me when it was his country on the line, his family, and his friends. Now that the invasion was taking place, did he really need to continue fighting alongside me? "Can't the serpent of Normandy find them on her own?"

"Simone is dead, Achille."

Achille swore, the glass slipping from his hand and shattering on the countertop. I leaped backward to escape shards of freshly broken glass that pelted through the air, not caring if I disrupted the precious pigeons.

He stood in silence for a moment, and I joined him, allowing myself to wallow in the dull ache that throbbed under my rib. Simone had pulled the strings and stoked the fires of the coast of France. She had earned first Achille's trust and then mine and now she was gone. Was it my fault?

I hadn't slept in three nights, pondering that question and blaming myself. Good agents dealt in information and when necessary, traded in lives. I had traded Simone's life for the lives of the American Airborne, finding my sacrifice void in their ranks. It was my fault but I couldn't wallow in it forever.

The liquor dripped onto the floor, bitter to my nostrils, as Achille raised his head to face the patches of sky that blinked down at us from the crumbling ceiling. His lips moved in wordless prayer. I lowered my head out of respect while he bid the ally and the friend of many years a strained goodbye. This war was making martyrs of mothers and fighters of children. What was it turning me into? I was far from the perfect agent, far from a good one. But even the worst agent in the OSS's hand could do some good, couldn't they?

When Achille's lips stilled and his eyes fell from the clouds, they were dark and his face set in stone. The swine that he detested would be in grave danger. I was but a pest to their plans, Achille could take them apart if he wanted to without raising a finger or a gun.

"To the west," Achille said, pulling a kerchief from his pocket, hidden in the soft print were the markings of Normandy's coastline. A map easily missed. He spread it out on the counter, tossing the glass shards to the sides.

"You'll find a communication post for Carentan," He jabbed a thumb at a point some five kilometers from our position. "Your Americans are divided between their two beaches, yes?"

According to Sink's maps and the snippets of intelligence I had caught from skulking around the company, that was true. The beaches, Utah and Omaha were open in the middle. A good push to the center would break us in half, dividing the forces and making it easy to pick them apart.

"Carentan is between the two. Middle ground."

"I want it," I said. Uncontrolled meant unpredictable. I didn't like surprises.

"Push ahead, make a path for your Americans. Old intelligence says that we cleared a battery en route but better clear it for squatters anyway."

"Germans?"

"Some retreating down the highways, some waiting. Doesn't hurt to do a little housekeeping."

I scanned the dampening cloth, the ink running in some places. The causeway leading to Carentan, the tiniest dot slowly bleeding onto the white fabric, was marked with four bridges. German communications could alert them of our impending movements. If I worked ahead and took down what I deemed dangerous to the success of the operation, I would be useful, wouldn't I? And that was the right thing to do, wasn't it?

I wanted to do something, my hands itching for the cool metal or the bubbling chemicals beneath my fingers.

"Thank you, Achille," I said.

I knew I wouldn't see him again. I knew I shouldn't have grown attached to my informants but I had become fond of the familiar faces that had made up my network. I was too soft.

"Any news from the city of lights?" I asked. Just for old time's sake.

"The Germans are shaking in their boots,"

"And soon they'll be running with their tails between their legs," I smiled. After two years in France, knowing that my removal and reassignment would be imminent I couldn't help but miss the familiarity. I picked my way through the rubble, the feathers and the dust coating my American jump boots. Nixon had found me a pair, the saddle shoes that had been my Irene staple weren't made for tramping through the mud of Normandy. I paused at the door, the man leaning heavily against the counter, his back turned to me. He couldn't have been older than my parents, their age only beginning to crease their faces but I could see Miriam's mask on Achille's grim face. I could see the haunted look of my father in his eyes. They had fought the same war, thinking it would be the only one. And here I was, twenty years later.

I opened my mouth, to say goodbye - I hadn't been able to say goodbye to Simone- but the words wouldn't leave my mouth.

"Bonne chance, petit vipère," Achille said.

A little adder, not quite the great serpent that German forces or Nixon had expected. A little adder who went undetected and underestimated. Maybe that wasn't so bad.