Dragonfly, page 28
“For what?” she asked sharply.
With a small chuckle, he plucked the bottle of burgundy from the bucket and poured wine into her glass, the bloodred stream catching the firelight. “Not for the reason you surmise, I assure you. Come now, Mademoiselle Colbert, after the quick dispatch you made of the lieutenant, do you think I’d be so foolish to tempt the fate you had in mind for him if you could have gotten to the swords?”
“For what, then?
“I would not feel right winning against a fencing opponent on the brink of starvation.”
“I appreciate your concern, Colonel, but I could not possibly fill my stomach knowing that those of my fellow lodgers were empty.”
“Well, we must rectify that, too.”
So early that morning, she and the nine residents of her hotel had awakened to find boxes of food deposited before their doors. A voucher for meat, cheese, eggs, and milk with information on a number to call for home delivery was attached. Her neighbors, in response to the unusual sounds heard before daylight in the hall, had stood on their thresholds in their nightwear with mouths agape at the piled boxes of fruit and vegetables, bread and coffee and tea and canned goods apparently meant for their consumption. When Victoria opened her door, all heads turned to her in unison, amazement melting to sad awareness of the cost for such bounty. Last evening, she had been noticed arriving back at the hotel in a German staff car seated beside a handsome young colonel recognized as a member of the security service of the Reichsführer.
As the evening had progressed at the café, the colonel had regaled her with stories of his days at Harvard and his trips around America, speaking English almost like a born native and coaxing a laugh from her at his mimic of a Texas drawl. “Ah even got down to Texas way and spent a spell in Foat Wurth. Found it hot as blazes and dry as a creek bed in drought,” he said.
She found it surreal sitting with a senior officer in the black uniform of the SS, dragged into discussing the latest movies and novels released in the United States, the likelihood of the Washington Redskins playing the Chicago Bears in the National Football League championship game, and, of all things, the pros and cons of hot dogs versus hamburgers. The colonel asked questions about her family and region of the country, which she answered sparingly, and he freely told her about his. He spoke with worshipful respect of his parents, both still living but unwell, a worry to him, and dotingly of a younger sister—“a gifted cellist”—and Victoria disclosed her anxiety over her mother’s dicey heart. It was like sitting in a coffee shop at William and Mary swapping family stories and current news with a foreign exchange student.
The name of Beaumont Fournier came up when the colonel asked her about her work as a French translator. Did she enjoy it?
Only when she did not have to translate works by French authors that she did not like, she’d said.
“Such as?” he’d asked.
“Beaumont Fournier, the writer of Cathédrale de Silence. I hope he’s not a friend of yours,” she’d said.
“An acquaintance only,” he’d said and shifted to another subject.
Looking back on that brief moment of exchange this Monday morning, Victoria felt certain that she’d seen a slight change in the colonel’s expression when she’d mentioned the author’s name, then chided herself. Derrick Albrecht was guilty of enough crimes without suspecting him of having something to do with the author’s drowning. The afternoon had waned to evening and table candles lit the café’s deepening shadows when Victoria, her stomach filled, drowsy from the wine, decided to dance with the cobra.
“Les Visiteurs du Soir is premiering at the Madeleine Cinema Saturday night,” he’d said. “It’s been greatly anticipated as one of the best films of the year. Would you care to go?”
Victoria had read of the coming premiere, open only to members of the German High Command and important officials of the Vichy government. She had been on the verge of refusing when suddenly she realized that literally staring her in the face was a source of intelligence equal to a vault of gold—and now she no longer had to worry about a dropped American syllable tripping her up. The colonel socialized with the Nazi war planners, had entry into their salons and soirees and dinner parties, where a high-level exchange of rumors and gossip were as normal within a trusted fraternity as the flow of champagne. Moving among the gatherings on the arm of Colonel Derrick Albrecht, she was bound to pick up information that could be of incalculable value to the Allies. Alistair Renault must not learn of her plan. Absolutely not! Sleeping with the enemy goes beyond the bounds of your mission! He would order her exfiltration, but how could she turn away from an opportunity to pick the lock of such a treasure chest?
But she would have to play her hand well. The colonel would expect stiff resistance. “Do I have a choice?” she’d asked.
He’d appeared sincerely mortified. “Why, Miss Grayson, have I given the impression that I would use my position to coerce you into doing anything that you would find objectionable?”
She’d said coolly, “Haven’t you?”
“I thought you rather enjoyed our Sunday bouts, but under the circumstances, I suppose I can understand your mistaken notion about my intentions. However, let me assure you that while I find you immensely—incomparably—attractive, your suspicions are unjustified. I ask only that you allow me to prove it.”
“And exactly how am I to do that?”
“Perhaps you would permit me the pleasure of practicing my English on occasion? I would not wish to impose on your time, but I would like to share a meal with you now and then, go to a film, perhaps escort you to a party. Surely you as well as I can use a pleasant diversion outside the four walls of our workplaces and cheerless abodes.”
“You would become bored soon enough.”
“I doubt it. Shall we begin our little exercise in proving who is right on that point Saturday night?”
“If you like.”
His brow arched hopefully. “Does…that mean you accept my invitation?”
“Yes, I should like very much to see the film.”
“Mademoiselle Colbert…Miss Grayson…Victoria!” He took her hand and raised it to his lips. “I am delighted.”
“Don’t be. I don’t promise to be good company.”
“Completely unnecessary. I shall simply take great pleasure in the enjoyment of your beauty and the opportunities to converse privately in English.”
Of course it had been coercion, simply a different sort than men in his position were at liberty to wield to get an unwilling woman into their bed. Oberleutnant Peter Janssen passed through her mind, but she believed she could trust that Colonel Derrick Albrecht had no intent to force her. He would exercise charm and civility and his considerable male appeal to win her over, but he would be disappointed. She would not be sleeping with the enemy, but she would be judged as if she were. Even the most harmless interaction with him would make her appear at best a French woman willing to share her bed with a high-ranking officer of the despised SS, at worst a collaborator. From the look the concierge gave her as she passed out of the hotel door, the residents were already murmuring among themselves.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
So Wilhelm will not be joining us for dinner tonight,” Chris said, having arrived for the boy’s tutoring session to find that Hans had taken him to a soccer game.
Major General March explained that the dinner was to be a surprise for his son, that he’d invited Barnard as well, but he’d come by the tickets unexpectedly and could not refuse his son’s pleas to go when he learned he had them. The general apologized for tying up his and Brad’s time when he and Wilhelm had enjoyed their company only two days earlier, but he’d thought it too late to cancel the evening’s dinner. Hans had left them a cold but most appetizing spread on the sideboard. They were to help themselves.
Chris heard the news uneasily. “And Madame Gastain? Is she not to join us as well?”
“Just us men tonight, though I will pop over to see her after dinner. She’s invited me for a nightcap.”
When Brad learned of this, his brow rose. Chris, catching Brad’s puzzled look, asked softly after their host left them to go to the wine cellar, “What’s up? You seem perplexed by what the general said.”
“It’s just that I don’t think Madame Gastain is expecting him,” Brad answered in the same lowered tone and explained that his landlady had not mentioned the nightcap when he spoke with her as he was leaving for the general’s house. She’d been in her garden dressed thickly, her hair sticking out from beneath a stocking cap, as she prepared to cover her plants against the heavy frost expected that night. “She’d have had a lot of repair work to do to get herself ready for the general’s visit,” Brad said. “Her butler says that Madame Gastain spends countless hours at her toilette when expecting guests.”
Chris said, “You think she forgot?”
“Wouldn’t she have remembered when I told her that I was on the way to dine with the general?”
Chris slipped the general’s invitation from his pants pocket. “I’m thinking something is fishy about tonight, too. This was delivered by courier today.” He handed the note to Brad. “I gather it was sent to me before March got the tickets.”
Brad frowned. “Otherwise, why not have Hans invite you to stay for dinner when you showed up for Wilhelm’s tutoring lesson this afternoon?”
“Exactly,” Chris said. “So I’m thinking something smells about tonight. Wilhelm suddenly not here. Madame not knowing, or forgetting, about her nightcap date. Of course we could be boxing at shadows, easy enough to do when you expect the bad guys to jump out of the bushes at any second.”
Brad nodded. “Hans told me that Wilhelm got in trouble with his papa yesterday. The sweet kid threw a fit when the general refused to invite us to share his chicken supper. Our invitations might be to make up to him for last night. I don’t think it could be more than that, unless somehow we’ve given him reason to be suspicious of us.”
“I don’t see how that would be possible, unless the Abwehr has a mole inside the Bern station.”
“We’d have been intercepted by now,” Brad said. “But to be on the safe side, we better keep a sharp eye out tonight.”
After dinner, the general glanced at his wristwatch and said, “Madame Gastain is expecting me shortly. I must leave before the soccer game is over.” Apologetically, he looked at Brad and Chris. “Gentlemen, could I impose upon you to wait here until Hans and Wilhelm arrive? Since my wife has been gone…I’d rather my son not come into an empty house. He’ll be bursting to tell me all about the game, but I am sure he would much rather share it with you.”
Brad looked at Chris, who nodded. “Of course, Herr General. It would be our pleasure,” he said.
They watched the bundled-up general walk out the door, then Chris turned to Brad. “Well, what do you think?”
“I think this opportunity to visit the general’s desk might be too good to pass up.”
“Or it’s a setup.” Chris gestured at the hall table. “The general forgot the bottle of port he brought from the cellar to take to Madame Gastain, which means that maybe he has a date with her after all. I guess we have to take a chance and let the cards fall where they may. You go do what you have to do, and I’ll stand watch in case he comes back for the port. I’ll say you’re in the toilettes.”
The general did not return, and ten minutes later, Brad rejoined Chris uneasy but keyed up. The Minox camera in his pocket held a photocopy of the list of names and addresses of the Abwehr’s undercover agents operating in the United Kingdom. Hans and Wilhelm arrived, and Brad had to wait until he and Chris walked out together to tell him of the list.
“Where did you find it?”
“On his desk tucked into a photo album under a stack of books. My guess is that he stuck it there out of sight until he could lock it up for safekeeping. I put the list back exactly in the position I found it, so if the general does suspect us and took note of the books’ order, he won’t notice even a corner out of alignment. I felt the list worth taking a shot of, Lapwing. The names could be the real deal.”
“I agree,” Chris said, “but it sure smacks of a setup to me. The general leaves us alone supposedly to visit a woman supposedly not expecting him, giving us all the time and opportunity in the world to help ourselves to a highly secret list of foreign agents within an easy search of his desk. It’s almost amateurish when you think about it.” He drew his scarf higher on his neck against the cold night air but felt another kind of chill creeping in.
“I’ll attach a note of our suspicions when I pass off the list to a cutout and let the major decide if it’s too much of a risk to act on the information,” Brad said. “I figure it will take a couple of days to check out its legitimacy. If he does decide to take a chance on the names and they prove phony, we’ll know for sure that we were set up.”
“And if they’re authentic…and the agents are rolled up…”
“Then the general will know the information came from somewhere,” Brad said, “but I believe he’d suspect his own men first, the reason those names were on his desk and not locked up at his headquarters. Nobody trusts anybody in his outfit. In any case, we should have time to get out. I figure we have two days before we know if we have to cut and run. Labrador will leave us a code signal. Remember it’s a squiggly line drawn somewhere in our symbols.”
“And if the major decides not to act on the information, we’re safe,” Chris said. “I’m going to call in sick, since we’ll have to check the mural hourly. How about you? Can you arrange for time off?”
“My schedule is flexible,” Brad said. “We’ll have to be careful of the beat cop—” He stopped talking and stared, and Chris looked to see what had cut off his speech. Madame Gastain’s mansion was totally dark, buttoned down for the night, no light shining in her drawing room window, or in any other part of the house that they could see, yet they’d not met the general on his return home.
“Maybe he got lucky, and they’ve retired to her bedroom,” Brad suggested.
“Maybe,” Chris mused, “or maybe not. Limpet?”
“Yes?”
“Pray that we’re boxing at shadows.”
That night neither could sleep and spent part of it packing for flight, making sure of their explosive devices and of instant access to their cyanide pills. Chris did not regret the risk Brad had taken. He would have done the same. It was part of the job. If the list of German spies proved legitimate, the worth of the intel was staggering, but finding it on the general’s desk had been too easy. They both agreed to that. The Abwehr chief might be careless once, but not twice, especially when he planned to be out of the house while guests were about. No German head of intelligence would be that trusting of anyone to go off and leave a classified document of such importance slipped hastily between the pages of a book on his desk. But the deed was done. They had only to wait to see what became of it.
*
When Major General March returned to his house that evening, he made immediately for the stairs and Hans’s room. He had not gone to Madame Gastain’s for a nightcap but walked in the opposite direction. He would not have imposed his company on the widow unannounced, and he would see her Saturday evening when they attended the premiere. The cold fog, turning to frost, had drawn around him like an icy blanket, and he would have rather been anywhere than walking the dark, deserted streets of an unfamiliar neighborhood this time of night, but he’d had to give his mousetrap time to be sprung. Frankly, he thought it would net him nothing but the assurance that there were no mice running free in his house.
“Did you set aside the wineglasses and mark them by name?” he asked his aide.
“I did, Mein General. They are in a sack on your desk.”
“Thank you, Hans.”
General March descended to his study. Donning gloves, he carefully inserted the classified document listing the insertions of Abwehr agents into England, Scotland, and Ireland into the sack containing the wineglasses. In the morning he would carry the lot to Abwehr headquarters and have the fingerprints on the glassware compared to those on the document.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
A sick ache filled his chest, radiated down his arms, burned like a lump of coal at the back of his neck. Achim would have thought he was having a heart attack if he had not known the source of his pain. His hopes, his dreams, his future lay broken back in that priest’s hole in Mademoiselle Dufor’s apartment. Bernadette Dufor was a spy, a conniving, deceiving, lying spy, a traitor to his belief and faith in her—in them!—and in the mural as simply a painting. He had been deceived into protecting a spy’s mode to communicate with her cohorts in the French Resistance or whatever rotten group she was working with. From the beginning, he had suspected the painting of being a clandestine tool and should have bypassed his ox-headed commander’s objections and gone straight to the Gestapo with his suspicions. Then he would have been spared the agony he suffered now.
The shock of his discovery had forced him to his bed Saturday. He’d deserted his post and staggered home to crawl under his loving grandmother’s quilted tribute to her grandson and pull it over his head. His bed and quilt had been his haven to take his disappointments and shattered trust since he was a child. In it, he could disappear from the world’s cruelties—his father and stepmother, his teachers, the bullies at school, the girls he had admired who had laughed at him, of whom Mademoiselle Bernadette Dufor had turned out to be the worst. In this dark, quiet retreat, this cocoon, he could nurse his injuries, plan his revenge. It took him the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday and Monday before he emerged from the swaddle of his bolt-hole.
It was now Tuesday morning. He was at his post, careful to have arrived after Mademoiselle Dufor left for work, and he had formed a plan. He would not turn her in to the Gestapo. He would wait until the Vichy government’s new paramilitary police force went into operation on the thirtieth of January. His application into the Milice had already been approved on the contingency that he prove himself worthy to belong. This he would do by handing over Mademoiselle Bernadette Dufor. What an entry permit! By then, he would have had time to widen his net to snag the others involved and to learn the mural’s code. That should buy him a seat in the organization—and a fairly high one, too. He couldn’t wait to see Mademoiselle Dufor’s face when she and the others were arrested and her precious mural literally wiped from the face of the earth. He had been raised Catholic, not that much of it had stuck, but he remembered the peace prayer of Saint Francis and the one line the nuns beat into him that he should live by: Where there is hatred, let us sow love. Thinking of Bernadette Dufor and his former feeling for her that now tasted like ashes in his mouth, he revised it: Where there was love, he would now sow hatred.
