One hears, in Zelle's dizzy pronouncements, the character's strange, self-satisfied singsong: 'The thing about children is that I never understood them. Her mother died while baking in the kitchen: Young Margaretha concluded that 'the kitchen can kill you.' Sent to teach school at 17, she was pounced upon by a headmaster who - per Murphy - taught her to value her body. Zelle grew up in a Netherlands town, abandoned early by her father. Anything helps if you want to become a spy, because everyone wants to believe you are a spy.' Instead she danced for him, for his eyes, just to see if the blue would change by the light of her dancing.'Īnd second-person thoughts seem to occur both in Zelle's mind, and also as part of the stories she (exasperatedly) tells: 'It helps to be fluent in a number of languages if you want to become a spy. The novel's third-person narratives gaze on the lonely prisoner in her cell: 'She'd like to have told everything, but his blue eyes looked as though they knew it already. Murphy's first-person sections establish Zelle's voice: complacent, calm, but also given to trance-like run-ons that suggest a child's spacey, headlong nature: 'I had heard stories about the mud like quicksand and about the water like a great gray wall when the tide came in and how it could catch you and knock you down and pour into your mouth and drown you so that you couldn't ever return ' Though we're informed she is telling her captors these recollections (a lack of quotation marks dulls that impression) in a Scheherazade-like effort to save herself, her memories only harden Bouchardon's resolve to disbelieve and destroy her. While waiting (in harsh conditions and failing health), Zelle recalls her life in brief, episodic installments. (The French accused her of spying for the Germans she insisted she was set up.) Her only visitors are a nun, a world-weary doctor, a callous cell guard, her feeble, ineffective old attorney and her prosecutor, M.

Margaretha Zelle, 42, awaits trial in a Paris prison in 1917, enduring repeated, hostile interrogations.

(Cheesecake photos contrast painfully with mug shots taken at her arrest - bloated, sad, plain.) From this certain tangle of reportage and rumor about the alleged double-agent, Yannick Murphy has fashioned a third novel, 'Signed, Mata Hari,' which reads as a fluid, dream-state channeling of that much-guessed-about life. Some offer photographs, confirming the woman's fascinatingly protean features and erotic beauty. Search for Mata Hari online, and you'll face a cluster of shrill Web sites. By Yannick Murphy LITTLE, BROWN 281 PAGES $23.99

Signed, Mata Hari by Yannick Murphy