“Yes, by the military. The government. A mobilization. Because of what happened in Poland on Friday. They’re just—gone. All of them. Back to their hometowns to prepare.” She leaned in to whisper. “And Remigius has fled. They say he went home to France, cursing Mussolini every kilometer of the way, no doubt.”

  Eleanor had no frame of reference to make sense of what Antonia was telling her. Her world was her art classes, hours in the studio, picnics in the piazza with these friends, this community that revolved around shape and form and beauty.

  “Surely this is temporary,” Eleanor offered.

  “Who knows? But I will have to return to Bologna, to my family. You need to decide what you’re going to do, see if you can get home. There is nothing for us here, at least for the time being. Not even our friends.”

  Eleanor nodded, still working to grasp the enormity of what had happened.

  “Cossutta,” she said to Antonia. “I’ll find him and see what he recommends.”

  Antonia nodded, offering a tearful hug. “Yes. He’ll know. He’ll make sure you stay safe.”

  . . .

  Eleanor found him in his office, packing up his books, tearing up papers in files he said he no longer had use for.

  “Is this real?” she asked him. “Can they really close the university? What are all the students supposed to do?”

  Cossutta smiled ruefully. “They can and they have, my dear. Italy and Germany have formed the Pact of Steel, so all of Italy’s resources must support the Reich, now that it has begun the war with Poland. Italian men are being ordered into military service and every industry must offer whatever help it can. That includes universities.”

  “But, professor, where does that leave me? Maybe it will be short-lived. Maybe I can wait it out.”

  “It will not be quick. These grievances will take years to settle and who knows how long the university will stay closed.”

  “What about you, professor? What will you do?”

  “Depends on what the government has in mind for me, my dear. Depends on if it’s something I wish to take part in. But you—I will help you as I can. It may no longer be safe for you here.”

  France closed its border with Italy within days and the Swiss allowed only those with diplomatic clearance to cross northward, leaving Eleanor with limited options to get out of Italy. Cossutta attempted to help her find passage across the Ionian Sea to Greece, quickly learning he lacked the pull and connections to get her a confirmed ticket; the passenger manifests were overtaken by wealthy Italians who had seen enough and were willing to pay and do whatever was necessary to get out from under the current regime. After a number of anxious weeks, Eleanor stopped pushing, resigned to the fact that for the moment, anyway, she would have to make a life in Florence. Miraculously, Cossutta found her a position at the Uffizi Gallery, Mussolini deciding Italy’s museums would stay open and protected by paramilitary to ensure Hitler would not expand his art collection at Italy’s expense. The whole thing was a bit of a sham: the museum was open sporadically and much of the collection had been moved underground. But for the next several years, her paycheck covered the rent on her small apartment and Eleanor had access to the gallery’s exquisite collection any time she liked. She had hours to wander, to sit, to gaze.

  When Rome fell to the Allies, her world shifted again. Her apartment ceased to be a haven and the streets became perilous—for blonde foreigners most especially—to navigate alone. Eleanor moved in with the few students she knew from the university who remained in Florence. Professor Cossutta took her in after that, Eleanor ultimately finding sanctuary at the city’s convent. That’s where she was when Germany surrendered. Despite the upheaval she’d endured—being cut off from her family, persistent food shortages, university friends scattered, some killed in the war—she believed she’d been given an incalculable gift: a years-long political education she would have never grasped had she stayed home. She developed a perspective that would shape her entire life.

  A year after the war ended, Talbot arrived in Florence on assignment for the U.S. Army. When he turned up at the Uffizi for a private tour arranged for American military officers, he seemed to Eleanor to be exactly the man she’d been waiting for—a man, finally, with the power to open doors too long closed to her, who would help her emerge from her stalled life. She never completed her art degree and somewhere along the way, lost her once-avid desire to do so. Years later, as she shared details of her life story with friends and neighbors, she could neatly attribute her lack of a degree to the war, not to any deficiency of talent.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  Talbot

  Alongside millions of patriotic Americans, Talbot enlisted in the army after Pearl Harbor fully expecting to take his turn on the line, clear-eyed that he might not survive the endeavor. At thirty-one, working for an established law firm in Atlanta, he could have avoided military service entirely or as his mother quietly urged, leveraged family connections to secure a posting stateside. But able-bodied and unmarried, he told her he’d feel like a coward for the rest of his life if he didn’t step forward when his country needed him.

  Unexpectedly, his University of Georgia law degree quickly moved him into a new pool of draftees. After basic training, he was plucked from his platoon and transported to Prince Edward Island, Canada where British security officers introduced him to the spy game. So rudimentary was the U.S. military espionage infrastructure in the opening days of the war, it was left up to the Brits and Canadians to train Talbot and other American recruits. By the end of 1942, Talbot was posted in Turkey, station chief for the fledgling Office of Strategic Services. Posing as a portfolio manager in a respected international bank in Istanbul, he and the cell he oversaw helped get cash in the hands of Resistance fighters in Europe while keeping an eye on the assortment of spies that traversed the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The OSS bestowed on him the code name Thrasher, the state bird of Georgia—an homage to his roots—and circulated the rumor that Talbot was in fact trading in illegal arms, a useful fiction that made adversaries wary, unsure of the length of his power and influence. His dark eyes and dark hair kept them guessing as to his nationality and his loyalties.

  At the intersection of eastern and western cultures, Turkey grappled to retain its neutrality in the war, and was in fact the nexus of Axis and Allied intelligence-gathering. In a city crawling with spies, Talbot and his team quietly conducted a range of operations. Some were complex and sweeping, like engaging a string of couriers to drop supplies to saboteurs, who fanned out to the north to intercept and derail German trains. Daily, they worked to validate a perpetual if ragged stream of information, bits and pieces that filtered into their offices either accidentally or on purpose. Rumors, allegations, musings. A bank customer—an Austrian who arrived in Turkey soon after the Anschluss—was overheard lamenting the contents of the latest letter from her son, a private in the German army. Reading between the lines, she believed her boy’s account ran counter to the Reich’s glowing reports of success on the Eastern front. Talbot and his group pursued corroboration through human assets—bribery, pillow talk—and soon, an intercepted cable between low-level German communications officers who should have known better revealed that their compatriots were dying in the snow for want of warm clothes and ammunition. These early but accurate insights presaged the massive German defeat at Stalingrad, clarifying for the Allied command that after his costly miscalculation, Hitler might have limited resources to defend his Atlantic Wall. Talbot was pleased to have contributed a small piece of intel that helped the good guys see the whole field.

  His work required him to cultivate an intense internal control of gestures grand and subtle, to master his facial muscles so that an eye blink, an involuntary tensing of his neck, his voice, would not betray him in a hard moment. As news arrived of the Allied invasion of France, he feigned such indifference that some of his colleagues questioned his loyalty, fearing he’d been turned. Coded messages went up to OSS handlers who responded, in so many words, that Talbot’s response was apt for someone of unclear origin, rumored to be dealing arms out the back door of a Turkish bank; the Yanks’ arrival on French shores could hurt business.

  By V-J Day, Talbot and his colleagues were shredding documents and packing up their tools, most of the team more than ready to return home. Talbot’s deputy, for one, was counting down the days. New Yorker Harold Warren was the sole member of the Istanbul cell with an actual background in banking. He was eager to resume his civilian career because the 1950s, he predicted, would be boom years and he wanted to be right in the middle of it. Talbot, however, was less ready to relinquish the broader sense of purpose—and successive high-stakes challenges—that had infused their work in Turkey.

  “So, Tal,” Harold began one night as they lingered over drinks, their office vacated, their personal effects packed for shipment. They were seated on the patio of a small bar, ringed by palm trees and open to the Sea of Marmara. The place was loud and raucous, with soldiers, refugees, citizens of the world, celebrating a world at peace. “What’s next for you?”

  Talbot, slightly drunk and completely content, studied the undulating waves just meters from the patio, their reliable rhythm reinforcing his sense of requiescence. That the war was over, that he was free to sit here with Harold and envision a future, a safe future in which he would no longer worry that an Axis assassin’s bullet would find him on the street, seemed almost too great a gift.

  “Well, Berlin, first, for the debrief, and then I plan to get into a little trouble in France. If I can get down there. You know, see the Riviera and just take it in and hell, not worry about anything for a few weeks.”

  “And check out a French girl or two, maybe, because I hear they are zo hahpy to be free zhat when zey see an Amerh-e-cahn…” this he said with the worst kind of French accent, “they’ll do anything, any-zing, so Tal, maybe you want to pull your uniform out of your footlocker to get on their good side. Or their bad side. Just get on ‘em however you can.”

  They laughed, heads thrown back, Harold slapping the table, drawing attention that no longer put them at risk.

  “And after that, you going back to law? Back to Atlanta?” Harold pressed.

  “I don’t think so. I think I want…I don’t know, to be a part of putting Europe back together. As I understand it, the occupation forces will be advising the provisional governments, which will have tremendous problems to solve. I think I could help with the work of sorting through some of the legal issues. But I don’t know. I’ll see what they say in Berlin.”

  “Better you than me, Thrasher. I’m leaving this mess in your hands.”

  . . .

  Berlin proved a grim echo of the city it had been, Allied bombs having reduced block after block of the city to dust and rubble. Defeated German soldiers returned to find food scarce, abandoned cafes that would never reopen, limited running water and sanitation, and the few buildings yet to collapse teetering, many missing roofs and entire facades. This destruction, so brutal and evident across Germany, was precisely as the Allied command had designed it, lest anyone at some later point, contend that Germany had not lost the war. Hitler himself had promulgated the lie that Germany had not been defeated in the first world war but had been betrayed somehow in the signing of the peace. But now, the millions of

  people living on the streets begging for food put to rest, finally, the myth of the thousand-year Reich.

  At the outset of his meeting at headquarters, his briefer informed Talbot that President Truman planned to dissolve OSS within days.

  “Where does that leave me?” Talbot asked. “Looking for a bunk on a troop ship home?”

  “Depends, sir,” said the young army officer, a major, who went on to explain that Washington envisioned a new agency to eventually take the place of OSS. “For now, intelligence-gathering will be divided between the military and the State Department. You can keep your commission and transfer into the new operation, once it’s up and running, if that sounds alright. The other option is to head back to civilian life—an honorable discharge and the thanks of a grateful nation for your service.”

  “What would I be doing before this new agency is operational?” he asked.

  The major smiled.

  “So glad you asked. We have a placement for a lawyer within our groups conducting damage assessments in cities across Europe. Washington wants a full picture of what it’s gonna take to get Europe back on its feet. Not just the infrastructure damage. We need a better understanding of the strength of the various political entities still in play. Your skills would be useful—and you can do the grand tour of Europe on Uncle Sam’s nickel, even though the place is a little pockmarked, shall we say, after six years of war.”

  While the contours of his work and of the new agency he would ultimately work for remained vague, it appealed far more to Talbot than returning to a law practice in Atlanta. So, much to his mother’s disappointment, he accepted the major’s offer, which came with three weeks of R&R folded neatly into the schedule.

  The obliging major helped arrange Talbot’s vacation travel, cobbling together transportation to the South of France. After a flight from Berlin to Paris, Talbot rode what rails he could in the general direction of the French southern coast. U.S. Army engineers were rebuilding rail lines the Germans had destroyed in their retreat but the job was massive, patchwork, and unpredictable. When the train abruptly stopped outside Dijon, his sanguine fellow passengers simply exited with their things and began to walk. Talbot hopped a farm wagon, the farmer more than happy to ferry the American with cash the fifteen kilometers past a burned-out station to one still receiving passengers. A Canadian army convoy mustering at the coast to exit the country picked him up to take him the final few kilometers.

  Arriving, finally, at his small room in a little seaside inn in Nice, Talbot dropped his duffle and collapsed on the bed. He had intended to find a cocktail and take in the scenery. But once he was alone, the window open to the smell and sound of the sea, his body demanded he stop and sleep. The adrenaline that had kept him awake and alive amid years of dangerous duty had done its job. It could now recede and allow Talbot to recover his natural rhythms for resting, for eating, for sex. For the first five days, he slept twelve, fourteen hours a day. He awoke sometimes before noon, sometimes at midday, at which point he ate, read, then lazed in the sand where he promptly fell asleep again. His nap usually lasted until he sensed himself alone on the beach, the other holiday makers having made their way inside to dress for the evening meal. He drank lots of artesian water and very little alcohol, because he wanted to fully feel the world around him in all its emerging vividness; to shed the carapace that had protected and shrouded him during his wartime duty.

  Seven days into his stay, the first morning he managed to awaken early enough, Talbot found an American newspaper—a week old—and made his way to the breakfast room. As he sat over his pastry and coffee, a woman approached and asked if she could join him, there being no other tables free. He obliged and they shared their stories, or parts of them anyway. Talbot said he was an American soldier on R&R (mostly true) and would be returning to the States soon (not exactly true). The woman said her name was Marie-Claire and that she was a widow from the Loire Valley, her husband killed in the earliest days of the war. She came to the coast to find members of his family and to begin to rebuild her life.

  “Children?” Talbot asked, and after an almost imperceptible pause, she shook her head. The way she did it, her slight hesitation, produced a flicker in Talbot’s brain, a fragment of cognizance he did not attend to as he would have only a few months earlier. He was on vacation, the war was over, and a beautiful woman had joined him for his meal.

  For the next few afternoons, he took his naps in his room, the window opened, the gulls cawing, Marie-Claire interrupting his rest in ways he did not mind at all. She had a habit of coming in after her morning on the beach, removing her bathing suit as she entered his room and leaving it in a sodden heap. She did not want to track in sand, she explained. She made her way to the bathroom—paraded, really, her breasts and torso white and damp, her legs and arms oiled and bronzed—usually pulling Talbot to her as she went, drawing him into the tiny shower. As she dragged a fragrant bar of soap over his back, his chest, his thighs, she pressed him about when he would be leaving, why their unexpected acquaintance that seemed to satisfy a need in both of them, had to end. She proposed spending the night with him at least once before he departed. How glorious it would be, she said, to awaken in a man’s arms again. Near the end of his stay, after a meal of the freshest fish and more glasses of a light Clairette blanche than Talbot cared to count, they retired to his room to share what turned out to be a vigorous, if bittersweet, farewell.

  When Talbot awoke, Marie-Claire was gone, as was all the cash in his wallet. He waited the better part of an hour, hoping that perhaps she’d gone to get them something for breakfast. When that did not seem to be the case, he made his way to the lobby and sought out the hotelier, asking if he’d seen the woman he’d been with the past week, Marie-Claire from the Loire. The innkeeper erupted in laughter, tried to recover himself, then laughed again, his hand held out in front of him like a stop sign, pleading with the monsieur to wait, please, so he could gather himself.

  “I was not aware she had invented a story,” the innkeeper finally said. “I thought you knew who she was and were a forgiving sort. She is not from the Loire. She is the daughter of the mayor here. Her father and husband—yes, she is a married woman, monsieur, with three children—are jailed, collaborators who profited from their service to the Germans. But now, of course, the well has dried up. So she, apparently, is developing new sources.”

  Four years in the clandestine services, Talbot thought, and I bought everything she said. Damn it all.

  Talbot thanked the innkeeper with a tight smile, his well-cultivated control masking his shock and embarrassment. He asked that his final bill be readied and left the inn, walking several blocks up and down the sloped streets to the makeshift office where the U.S. military had set up shop. After several questions and a bit of discussion, Talbot secured a check that represented an advance on his pay that he could cash at the banking office down the hall. He headed back towards the inn, taking in for a final time, the charm of the narrow streets, the pungent smells near the pier, the relentlessness of the sun making its way across a pale blue sky. Talbot lamented that the peace and sense of restoration he found here had been spoiled by Marie-Claire’s unnecessary lies. Retrieving his duffle, he paid his bill and decamped to the station to catch a train to take him east. He would begin his work with a team in Florence in a matter of days.