Code Name Hélène

In January 1939, Henri² proposes at their favorite restaurant. Nancy¹ hesitates, asking for time. A week later, he gives her a wire-haired terrier puppy named Grenadine, a wife for her beloved dog Picon. She accepts.

They marry at Marseille's Town Hall on November 30, 1939, with strangers as witnesses. The official who once blocked their marriage license performs the ceremony. Their reception at the Hôtel du Louvre et Paix overflows with champagne fountains, seafood, and dancing.

Henri's² father is served spiked drinks and falls asleep early. That night, in Henri's² rooftop flat with 360-degree views of Marseille, they consummate their marriage. Three months earlier, on September 3, they had listened together as Britain and France declared war on Germany.

Henri² is conscripted in March 1940, deployed to a fortification on the Maginot Line. Nancy¹ calls in her wedding gift: a truck converted into an ambulance. Despite barely knowing how to drive, she heads north toward Belgium as Germany invades. For six weeks, she ferries wounded soldiers, refugees, and dying civilians from the front lines near Marville to field hospitals, sleeping in her truck, eating mess-hall food, witnessing carnage she had only reported on before.

When France falls in June, she retreats south. Her ambulance breaks down near Nîmes. She walks and hitchhikes back to Marseille, arriving to find the city bombed by Mussolini. Henri² returns weeks later, his left arm in a sling from a bullet wound.

Back in Marseille, Nancy¹ begins delivering packages for Antoine the barman:¹³ fake identification papers for Jewish refugees. She meets Ian Garrow,¹² a Scottish officer, and Patrick O'Leary,⁷ a mysterious Belgian, who run an escape network.

They recruit her to courier documents, radios, and eventually people from Marseille to Toulouse, where a woman named Françoise guides them across the Pyrenees. Nancy¹ adopts the alias Lucienne Carlier.¹ She uses her society-wife persona as cover, shopping and lunching while coordinating drop-offs.

Henri,² once he discovers her work, does not try to stop her. Instead he buys her a bicycle and teaches her to ride, observing that a woman on a bicycle in France is invisible. She becomes known to the Gestapo only as the White Mouse,¹ a figure they know exists but cannot catch.

Ian Garrow¹² is arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Fort Saint-Nicolas, then transferred to the Mauzac concentration camp. Nancy¹ visits him, then locates a corrupt guard with a harelip through a note tossed from a vehicle. She negotiates his price: 500,000 francs.

Henri² wires 40,000 for the deposit without question, despite tapped phone lines. Nancy¹ delivers the full sum in a satchel during a second trip to Bergerac, along with a guard's uniform. On December 8, 1942, a phone call confirms Garrow's¹² escape.

He reaches Spain safely. But shortly after, Patrick O'Leary⁷ is betrayed by a double agent named Roger le Neveu. O'Leary⁷ is arrested in a Toulouse bistro and sent to Dachau. Nancy,¹ forbidden by O'Leary⁷ from intervening, must flee France herself.

On March 1, 1943, Henri² sees a woman following Nancy¹ in the street. He realizes the Gestapo has identified his wife as the White Mouse.¹ While she is out, he packs a trunk with her clothes, jewelry, engagement ring, cash hidden in waistbands and pockets, and Les Misérables. When Nancy¹ returns for lunch, he tells her she must leave immediately.

He cannot come with her; too many eyes watch them. He gives her the purse packed with money and papers, tells her where to find his safe-deposit box if anything happens to him, and kisses her at the door of their flat. Picon howls as she walks away. She catches a train to Toulouse, her last words to Henri² being the flippant farewell they always used: 'Back soon.'

Nancy's¹ train to Toulouse is boarded by Vichy police. She is arrested, interrogated, and slapped by an officer. Patrick O'Leary,⁷ pretending to be a Milice agent having an affair with her, secures her release. In Perpignan, she finds a guide named Bastian and joins a group crossing the Pyrenees. The trek takes three days through snow and ice.

She develops scabies from infested hay in a barn, her body covered in oozing sores. Her guides, Jean and his granddaughter Pilar, push the group relentlessly. She loses her engagement ring during a desperate jump from a train under machine-gun fire. When she finally crosses the Riu Rippol into Spain, she is starving, bleeding, and unrecognizable. A British ship eventually carries her to England.

In London, Nancy¹ is rejected by de Gaulle's Free French forces but recruited by the Special Operations Executive. At a training facility in Scotland called the Mad House, she undergoes brutal preparation.

Denis Rake,⁵ a former circus performer, teaches her to crush a man's windpipe with the flat of her hand, drilling the motion against wooden tables. René Dusacq instructs her in weapons: revolvers, Sten guns, grenades, bazookas. She excels at sharpshooting. She jumps from a hot-air balloon for parachute practice.

She runs obstacle courses in the dark with her legs tied to a partner. The psychological examiner shows her inkblots; she sees only blots. Buckmaster tells her she passed because stubbornness reveals character. She is given the code name Hélène.¹

After her parachute landing, Tardivat⁸ drives Nancy¹ and Hubert⁶ to Mont Mouchet, the château of a Maquis leader called Gaspard.⁴ Exhausted, they share a bed to sleep, revolvers under their pillows. At dawn, they sneak out via a trellis and eavesdrop outside the kitchen window. They hear Gaspard⁴ and his lieutenants discussing a plan to seduce Nancy,¹ kill her, and steal the money she carries.

Hubert⁶ suggests killing Gaspard;⁴ Nancy¹ demurs but makes it clear who holds power. When Gaspard⁴ bursts into their room expecting to find them in bed, they are fully dressed and armed. She calls him stupid to his face and rejects his advances. He throws them out, calling them useless without their missing radio operator.

Weeks later, Tardivat⁸ brings Nancy¹ to Gaspard's⁴ château to interrogate a captured German agent. In the kitchen, she finds a man named Roger le Neveu tied naked to a table, his buttocks and thighs charred from a red-hot poker rammed repeatedly into him by Gaspard's⁴ lieutenant Judex.

Gaspard⁴ reads Roger's confession: he was responsible for the arrest of Patrick O'Leary⁷ and was sent to assassinate both Gaspard⁴ and the White Mouse.¹ Nancy,¹ hiding her personal connection, orders Hubert⁶ to give Roger a merciful bullet.

Gaspard,⁴ furious, grabs her shoulder. She pulls a knife from her boot and presses it to his wrist until he releases her. She then dictates her terms: Gaspard⁴ will divide his men, disperse them, and prepare escape routes before receiving any weapons.

Nancy¹ and Hubert⁶ drive to Termes seeking a Resistance contact named Soutine. They find a Nazi bus blocking the road. Creeping into the village, they witness the aftermath of an atrocity: Olivia Soutine, pregnant and near term, has been chained to a lamppost and sliced open from throat to groin by Obersturmführer Wolff's men.

Her unborn child lies dead at her feet. Her toddler daughter screams, reaching for her mother, but the villagers are forbidden to touch the child under threat of mass execution.

Nancy¹ sees Wolff himself, the same officer from Vienna eight years earlier. Hubert⁶ physically restrains her from attacking. They retreat, powerless. On the way out, Nancy¹ hot-wires and steals the Nazi bus, claiming it as her new mobile headquarters.

After a German assault forces the Maquis to retreat, their radio operator Denis Rake⁵ buries his equipment per protocol. Cut off from London, Nancy¹ volunteers to ride a bicycle 250 kilometers to Châteauroux to find another radio operator. She wears a skirt and blouse, carrying only bread, cheese, and brandy in a string bag.

The journey takes her through checkpoints, past the garrison at Montluçon, and into towns where German patrols stop her. By nightfall she has covered 200 kilometers, her thighs blistered and bleeding, her tailbone bruised. She sleeps in a barn loft on sacks of alfalfa seed.

At Châteauroux, she learns the operator she sought was killed by Wolff's men in Bourges, but his colleague Bernard can transmit. She codes a message to London requesting new equipment, then cycles back, arriving at camp hallucinating. She falls unconscious as she delivers the news.

Three women are discovered hidden among Gaspard's⁴ men. Two are French girls, Cécile and Floria, who were kidnapped and repeatedly raped by five maquisards. The third woman is Marceline,³ the collaborationist who once loved Henri² and has now been sent by Police Commissioner Paquet to assassinate the White Mouse¹ for a five-million-franc bounty.

Nancy¹ orders the five rapists executed by firing squad, forcing Gaspard⁴ and Judex to participate. Then Marceline³ faces the guns alone. She confesses to having Henri's² wedding ring on her thumb when he was killed, to tearing up his treasured list of things about Nancy.¹ She spits toward Nancy¹ before the volley. Nancy¹ herself fires one of the seven rifles, uncertain whether her bullet was among the killing shots.

On August 16, 1944, Nancy¹ leads a precision strike against the Gestapo headquarters in Montluçon's Hôtel d'Orcet. Dressed in civilian clothes, she walks past guards into the lobby. In the elevator, she encounters Wolff himself.

Before he can speak, she slams the flat of her hand into his throat, exactly as Denis Rake⁵ taught her in Scotland, crushing his windpipe. She drives her knee into his groin, then speaks over his suffocating body, naming each of his victims: the old woman in Vienna, Olivia Soutine, Alex the radio operator, Patrick O'Leary.⁷

She presses her boot to his throat. When he dies, she rides to the top floor, where Hubert,⁶ Denis,⁵ and Tardivat⁸ have already positioned themselves. They kick open the suite door and lob grenades into the room where four dozen Nazi officers are having pre-lunch drinks. The explosions kill them all.

On August 30, 1944, Nancy¹ turns 32. She wakes to a trumpet blast and stumbles outside the château at Fragne expecting another German attack. Instead, Gaspard,⁴ Fournier,¹⁰ Tardivat,⁸ Judex, Louis,¹⁴ Jacques,¹⁵ Anselm, and over a hundred maquisards stand in formation in the circular driveway. A trumpet sounds again. Every man raises his hand in salute.

They are acknowledging her as their leader, the woman who armed them, trained them, and led them through retreat and counterattack. Hubert⁶ and Denis⁵ flank her. Paris has been liberated. The Germans are retreating. A few days later, she drives south toward Marseille, toward whatever remains of her old life, accompanied by the men who have become her new family.

Nancy¹ returns to Marseille in September 1944. At Antoine's¹³ bar, she asks for Henri.² Antoine's¹³ face tells her everything. Henri² was arrested by Paquet, imprisoned at Fort Saint-Nicolas, stripped, beaten, his fingers broken.

Marceline³ visited his cell repeatedly, offering freedom in exchange for Nancy's¹ location. She wore his wedding ring on her thumb. She destroyed the handwritten list he had carried for seven years: Nancy's¹ dislikes, her inability to whistle or ride a bike. Henri's² father came to beg him to give Nancy¹ up.

Henri² refused. Marceline³ shot him. Nancy¹ goes to their looted apartment and screams into the pillow until her throat bleeds. Ficetole returns Picon to her. From the bank vault, she retrieves Marceline's³ gold 'H' necklace, abandoned as a taunt, and throws it in the trash.