Dragonfly, page 26
“Well then, the next time they come, you must ask Hans to serve them tea and sandwiches. Now let’s say no more about it,” Konrad ordered, sterner than he wished.
The main reason that he had refused his son’s request was that he did not want to include Herr Bauer in the invitation. Wilhelm thought of his tutor and soccer mate in pairs, and to exclude one would have resulted in another tantrum, but Konrad had become unsure of Herr Bauer.
He had been in the business of intelligence too long to ignore the smell of smoke, no matter how faint. Even a whiff signaled fire somewhere or at least one that had been present. His trip to Wilhelm’s former school yesterday had netted him a couple of puzzling tidbits worth reflecting upon, but he had regrettably set Herr Bauer more firmly in the crosshairs of that pig, Louis Mueller. He had gone to the school to request a harmless look at Herr Claus’s employment file on the pretense of locating the address of the young man’s parents to arrange a surprise visit from them as a gift to their son at Christmas.
But unfortunately for Herr Bauer, Konrad’s request had opened the door for Louis Mueller to infer slyly that his recently hired instructor was up to something more than teaching math and track-and-field sports. Exactly what, he couldn’t say, but the general best be on guard. Since Mueller appeared a man suspicious by nature and his dislike for Herr Bauer blatantly obvious, Konrad would have disregarded his insinuations had he himself not had doubts of his own.
“On what grounds do you base your suspicions?” he’d asked, and Herr Mueller had unlocked the door of Claus Bauer’s cube of an office and without compunction riffled through his lesson planner until he came to the page he was looking for. It was missing. The man’s pink face blanched to the shade of boiled meat, undoubtedly thinking that General Konrad March would think he’d been blowing smoke up his anus.
“I—I swear that it was here,” he cried, without realizing that the missing page was more damning than what was written upon it. “Look, there’s a gap in the dates!”
“I see,” Konrad had said.
Some color was restored to the director’s face when a page was similarly discovered missing from the Sorbonne’s personnel director’s daily diary that Mueller claimed to have stated CB in place. “Do you not see the oddity of the coincidence, eh, Herr General?” he’d asked, a spark of triumph lighting his porcine eyes.
“Yes, I see,” said Konrad. “I ask that you keep this visit confidential between ourselves, understand?”
“Most certainly, Herr General,” Louis had said with a conspiratorial wink that almost earned a slap across one of his portly cheeks.
“And now perhaps you can tell me how you happened to come across the personal writings in the private diaries of your instructor and the Sorbonne’s personnel director?” Konrad had asked just to watch those cheeks blanch again.
At his dining room table, Konrad rang the table bell.
Hans appeared. “Mein General?”
“As a peace offering to Wilhelm, let’s have Herr Bauer stay for dinner tomorrow night after their tutoring session.”
“Very good, sir. I shall serve roast beef with potatoes, brussels sprouts, and much gravy. That should fill Herr Bauer’s stomach. And…Herr Wagner as well?” Hans suggested, a note of hope in his voice.
“Of course. Let’s invite him, too. Why not?”
“The young master will be very pleased. I will tell him when I take up a plate.”
Konrad’s heartfelt desire was that he, too, would be pleased at the end of the evening tomorrow night, for he intended to set a trap for Herr Bauer that would establish beyond all doubt the tutor’s innocence or guilt.
*
Sunday afternoons Brad spent tying flies and repairing and cleaning the parts of fishing rods for Captain Allard’s customers. It enabled him to pick up extra money that he’d not have to add to the stash provided by the OSS, should there be enough left to turn in at war’s end. Once it was all over, he hoped to convert his French francs to dollars to set aside for the kids’ college funds. By “kids,” he meant Bobby and Margie. By the time he made it home, Bobby would be college age, and he couldn’t expect Jared Cramer, his mother’s new husband, to pick up the tab for his adopted siblings. Beata, yes. As Joanna’s daughter, she now belonged to Jared Cramer as part of his family, but the others…they were his responsibility.
He tried not to think too much about his home and family, the glory of the White River at the end of fall before the mountains slept beneath their snow caps and the rainbows settled down in their winter habitats. That was fruitless thinking. There was critical work specific to his assignment to be done here in Paris, and he was the only one in place to do it. It was essential to keep his pole in the water while the fishing was good. Rumors were flying about an Allied invasion coming by way of the coast, and that had made the captain’s customers nervous and edgy. They’d become careless about dropping classified secrets before a German fishing guide, one of their own countrymen, who gave no mind to anything but his fish business. Friday, he’d heard of a shipment of tungsten coming from Spain headed for a Nazi weapons manufacturing plant, but he had not yet learned the name of the ship or port where it would be unloaded. With more time, he believed he could wheedle the information out of the man who’d been hired to guide the ship into harbor. Tungsten was essential for the manufacture of military arms, and the delivery would be the perfect target for the French Resistance or RAF.
Brad heard light footsteps on the stairs to his apartment and smiled to himself. He knew who they belonged to. The boy’s father and Hans would chastise him for bothering the fisherman, but Brad welcomed the company. He got up and opened the door before the boy could knock. “Wilhelm, my friend! What brings you up to my lair?”
The boy thrust forth a tray covered in a table napkin. “For you,” he said, large blue eyes filled with a giver’s hope that his gift would be well received. Brad removed the napkin. The tray contained a plate going cold of slices of roasted chicken with servings of a mushroom concoction and apples smelling of cinnamon and sugar. A bowl of custard sat alongside.
“Food,” the boy said in case Brad needed an explanation.
“I see that,” he said. “It looks and smells delicious.”
“But don’t tell Papa or Hans. I was to eat it myself, but I know you are more hungry.”
Brad’s heart moved at the boy’s selflessness. It resurrected a memory of Bobby in the days he’d brought him and his sister home. Here, sister, take part of my share. You’re younger than me and still growing.
“I promise not to tell,” Brad said. “You are very nice to do this.”
“And I’m to invite you to dinner tomorrow night with Herr Bauer.” The boy’s face lit up. “We’ll have a party!”
“I will look forward to it. Thank you very much.”
“Good-bye now. I’m not to pester you,” the boy said, and scampered down the stairs before Brad could invite him to stay.
At an upstairs window, Konrad watched his son sprint across the adjoining lawns back to the house before he could be discovered missing. He had taken the fisherman his own dinner, and now he would go to bed hungry. Pain and pride filled his chest. The boy would never make it in the army. He was too loving and kind, but to no regret of his father. Konrad regretted only the world in which his son was too tender to live, a world that he and his kind had helped to create that would cause him to be suspicious of young men like Claus Bauer and Barnard Wagner. But his professional detectors were now on full alert. He had caught those whiffs of smoke, and the fisherman as well as the tutor was not beyond their scope. He hoped with all his heart that tomorrow’s trap would prove his suspicions absurd, but God help those young men if it revealed either of them to have befriended his son only to spy on his father.
CHAPTER FIFTY
At the head of the stairs Colonel Derrick Albrecht demanded, “What is going on down there?” but a narrowed glance at Victoria’s unbuttoned blouse, the trickle of blood on its collar, and the bleeding nick in her neck gave him a quick answer. She stared up at him, adrenaline spent, with no breath, strength, or will to explain.
Hearing a voice and footsteps, Oberleutnant Peter Janssen scrambled, panting, to his feet, surprise overtaking his fury as a figure wearing the black leather overcoat of the SS and the rank of Standartenführer descended the stairs. His eyes widened further when the SS colonel reached the basement floor and he recognized that indeed the officer was Colonel Derrick Albrecht.
Instantly, the lieutenant pointed a finger at Victoria and screamed in German, “She attacked me, Colonel! That French bitch lured me down here on the pretense of requiring assistance with a washing machine, but her intent was to kill me—rid France of one more Wehrmacht officer, she said. She came at me with a rapier from one of those swords!” He swung his finger to the stack of cleaned and sanded blades. “I would be dead if I hadn’t knocked the rapier from her hand. It’s over there!” He directed the finger at the area where the sword had fallen. “Thank God for your arrival.”
“Yes, indeed. It appears that I arrived just in time,” Derrick agreed. “I can see what the death of an officer like you would have meant to the German Wehrmacht.” His gaze swept to Victoria’s lingerie hanging on the line, then settled on the sergeant’s half-unbuttoned jacket.
The lieutenant hastened to rebutton it, growing pink in the face. “I—I, it was so warm in here, I had to—to—”
“—remove your jacket. Just so. I quite understand.” He switched his attention to Victoria. “You are bleeding, Mademoiselle Colbert,” he observed calmly, reverting from German to French, and handed her his white handkerchief.
Victoria pressed it to her neck. The colonel could not have mistaken what had almost occurred, but would he take the word of a Wehrmacht officer over hers? She had followed the lieutenant and colonel’s dialogue in German, but she said in French, “I don’t understand what he said, Colonel, but it doesn’t sound like the truth.”
Derrick turned again to the lieutenant and spoke in German. “What is your name, Oberleutnant?”
The lieutenant snapped to attention and threw up a smart Nazi salute. “Oberleutnant Peter Janssen on the staff of Major Hartmann in the office of Wehrmacht communications, Herr Colonel!”
“How did you happen to be at L’Ecole d’Escrime Français on Sunday, Oberleutnant Peter Janssen?”
“I—I saw a light on in the salle. I tried the door and found it unlocked. I—I thought I might find one of the instructors or students at practice who would give me a bout.”
“Ah, so you fence?”
“I… uh, yes. Foil.” The lieutenant glanced quickly at Victoria to see if by chance she’d interpreted his claim and would dispute it.
Derrick smiled. “Is that so? Good.”
Relief flashed across the lieutenant’s face at the colonel’s friendliness, taking it as evidence that his story had been accepted. His expression turned to horror when the colonel stepped to the swords stacked against the stairwell and took two foils by their pommels.
“Mademoiselle Colbert,” Derrick said softly, his eyes on the lieutenant, “perhaps it would be best that you go upstairs. We will not engage today, but I would appreciate your waiting for me. Also, may I impose upon you to ask my driver to join me in the basement?”
Victoria complied without a word, but at the top of the stairs she heard the whip of a foil tested in the air and the colonel say, “En guarde!”
Less than fifteen minutes later, unruffled, showing no effects of the deed Victoria was certain had been committed in the basement, Colonel Derrick Albrecht reappeared in the salle’s small conference room, where she waited shivering in her bloodied silk blouse, still shaken. The colonel was without his gloves but was wearing his overcoat, which she’d guessed the contest in the boiler room did not call for him to remove. He carried her jacket and coat over his arm. She stared up at him accusingly. “There were no protective rubber tips on the points of those foils,” she said.
“So Oberleutnant Peter Janssen discovered.”
Despite her loathing for the lieutenant, Victoria demanded, “What did you do to him?”
“I did not relieve France of one more Wehrmacht officer, if that is your concern,” he said. He held open her jacket. “I merely taught him a lesson in manners. Come, you must be freezing, and did I hear a murmur of hunger earlier? When did you eat last?”
“It is no matter,” Victoria said, slipping into the blissful warmth of her jacket and then her coat. “I am fine. My gratitude for your assistance. Now all I require is to get to my hotel.”
“Without your laundry? I assume those were your delicates hanging on the line?”
“Oh, yes, there are those. I’ll just go get them…”
“That is not necessary. Karl is folding them now. They’re dry. He’s married and therefore knows the finesse required to handle such items. He’ll take them to the car.”
“No—no, really, Colonel,” she said, understanding his meaning. “You are kind to offer a ride, and again I am so grateful for your appearing when you did, but I am quite all right now. The metro is not far, and the walk will do me good. I can get to my hotel on my own.”
The colonel took hold of her elbow. “You are in no condition at the moment to entertain any such delusions, Victoria. Are all the members of the Grayson family so pigheaded, or is the trait restricted only to you? You may answer that question on the way to the car.”
For the stretch of a few arrested heartbeats, Victoria thought she’d only imagined, filtered through the wooly residue of last night’s nightmares, her fatigue, hunger, insomnia, and attempted rape, a voice addressing her in English by her own name. Then the fog lifted. There was no point in trying to bluff her way out of this. Colonel Albrecht was not a man to be deceived. She’d been a fool to think that she could escape his infallible ear. She breathed deeply. Right now, knowing what she faced, death did not seem like a bad option. Her cyanide pill was in the lining of her coat. If her hands were left free, a quick pull of the seam’s thread, and she would be dead before they left the salle. Her friends in Dragonfly would remain safe.
But he would expect her denial. As he led her away, she spoke in French. “What are you talking about? I am Mademoiselle Veronique Colbert.”
“I am afraid not. You are Victoria Grayson from Williamsburg, Virginia, in the United States of America. You graduated with a degree in Franco studies from William and Mary College, where you were America’s hope to win the gold in foil in the 1940 Olympics. Your brother, Lieutenant Lawrence Grayson, is a pilot in the RAF.”
At her speechless silence, he said, “You must of course be wondering how I am aware of that information. The Sicherheitsdienst has sources in America, but I have known since the moment I heard you speak that you are an American, Victoria.” He tendered a small smile. “At the risk of appearing boastful, I have an unerring ear for languages, but I admit mine for English was boosted by the year I spent at Harvard University. A great country, America. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there. Now watch your step,” he said when they were at the door. “I am quite alarmed by your condition. You’ve paled even further.”
“Where are you taking me?” Victoria demanded. “To your interrogation cells at Sicherheitsdienst headquarters, I presume?”
He halted to stare at her, genuinely shocked. “Now why would you presume such a thing? I know all that I need to know about you already, including why you are in France.”
“Which is?”
“To discover the fate of your fiancé, Ralph DuPont, an American pilot also flying for the RAF until he was shot down near Paris in May of last year. You’ve now discovered to your deep sorrow that he is indeed lost.”
Alarmed for Madame Dupree, she asked, “And how did you learn that information? It couldn’t have come from your source in America.”
He opened the salle door and steered her outside. “I didn’t know for sure of your sad discovery until you just confirmed it. So why would I wish to arrest a woman who came to the country of her enemy only to search in vain for the man she loved? Do you think me that much of a fiend?”
He paused, brow raised, to await Victoria’s answer. When she remained silent, he sighed disappointedly. “I can only extend my condolences to such a woman and envy the man who had earned such courage and devotion. Now shall we?” He indicated the door that Karl held open to the back seat of the staff car. Victoria slipped in and the colonel settled beside her. In the whirling reel of her emotions was the relief that for the moment, she and her cover were safe. She could assume that the colonel’s dig into her personal life had missed her undergraduate studies in German and the detail of her sabbatical from G. P. Putnam’s Sons in New York—information that in any intelligence organization in the world would have raised a red flag. So for the time being, she was unsuspected of being a spy. The Nazis shot spies. They did not send them off to concentration facilities or labor camps; they lined them up against a wall and shot them. Victoria forced back a surge of hysterical laughter over the irony of it. Ralph’s failed flight over Paris had saved her mission, and his death, her life from the firing squad.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Sundays, Achim Fleischer took a break from his guard duty, but on Saturdays he stayed until the Jewish curfew, when he was relieved by the presence of German patrols in the area. Bridgette was therefore surprised when she returned to the convent Saturday after the meeting at La Petite Madeleine and did not find him at his post, nor was he there this Monday morning of November 2 as she set off for La Maison de Boucher. The day had broken foggy and rain was forecast, but, like the American mailman, Achim Fleischer had so far allowed neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night to stay him from his appointed rounds. Had he become ill?
With a nick of concern, Bridgette looked up and down the street for a glimpse of his rain gear, the white cap and cape worn by municipal policemen, but the Rue des Soeurs de Charité offered no sign of him. Bridgette stood a moment in the thick fog and silence. His absence was unsettling. The street seemed eerily empty without him. He had become a fixed feature of her morning. When no one was about who raised suspicions of imminent mischief, he would walk with her to the corner and see her off to the metro with a wish that she enjoy her day.
