Dragonfly, page 34
“A surprise,” Victoria repeated. There were surprises and then there were surprises. A surprise from a suspicious colonel in the SS could hold very unpleasant connotations. “What kind of surprise?”
“It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you, now would it?” He held out his arm. “Shall we go?”
“Where to?”
“Part of the surprise.”
With Karl at the wheel and the top of the staff car lowered to allow the sun on their faces, Victoria watched Paris slip by with growing unease. It was one thing to be an American innocent caught behind enemy lines, quite another to be caught as an American spy. “Where is Karl taking us?” she asked when they entered the countryside. She pretended casual disinterest, but she could not hear the wind for the drum of her heartbeat in her ears.
“Part of the surprise. Enjoy the ride,” he answered.
Because it would be her last? Victoria glanced at his profile, stoic, unreadable. Perhaps it was the civilian clothes, but he seemed a different person from the man she knew, a stranger, even. She much preferred him in his military uniform, a cobra out in the open rather than a rattlesnake camouflaged in the bush. He held his head slightly back, his face tilted to the sun, and did not speak as the car sped along, seemingly interested only in the pleasure of the sunlit day.
After a five-mile drive, her heart rate increased when Karl turned through a pair of majestic gateposts flanking the entrance to a road that wandered darkly through an evergreen forest. A few hundred meters later it forked off between a storybook chateau atop a far hill and a stone folly in the opposite direction. Karl took the road toward the folly.
The colonel spoke for the first time. “Count Darold Archambault’s country estate. He and his family have retired to Switzerland for the duration of the war.”
Haven’t they all? Victoria thought and wondered numbly if the duke had confiscated it for his own use. Ancestral strongholds like the count’s held dungeons.
In Victoria’s experience, follies were usually erected by people who wished it known that they had money to waste on nothing. This one at least had value in that it overlooked gently rolling acres that reminded her of the green splendor of English downs. It was enclosed except for its front and back entrances and came equipped with a stone slab table with benches on either side and a fireplace stacked with wood.
“Karl, if you will do the honors,” Colonel Albrecht instructed in German, gesturing toward the trunk, and offered a hand to Victoria to help her from the back seat. “A perfect place for a picnic, no?” he said in French.
“A picnic?”
“Of the American variety. I had it prepared especially for you. Fried chicken and potato salad. Apple pie for dessert, a taste of home.”
“That’s the surprise?”
“Yes. Are you pleased? You looked…frightened when I first suggested a surprise. What did you think—that I had something else of a more nefarious nature in mind? Now why ever would you assume that?” There was a light in his eye—playful, ironical. Was he toying with her? Victoria felt another roll of unease. Something definitely was going on here.
“Can you blame me? I never know what to expect from you, Colonel Albrecht.”
“Derrick, please. Have we not agreed to first names, and have I not assured you that you have nothing to fear from me? Come, let us walk while Karl prepares the fire and table.”
The colonel walked toward a snow-covered crest still holding some of its green against the approaching winter. The forest, deep and dark, the trees’ outer branches sparkling with snow, stood guard behind it while a swath of open country threaded with a winding creek lay before it. The frosty country air smelled fresh and sharp, carrying scents of pines and clean water, and Victoria drew in a halting breath to steady her nerves as they walked along.
“That breath had a shudder to it,” Derrick commented, and observed before she could respond, “This is a rather wonderful place, isn’t it? I must bring you here in warmer days. The valley is blindingly green in the spring.”
Victoria glanced at him. He spoke of a future, but he was a master at psychological manipulation—The best interrogator we have without resorting to…other methods, an SS colleague once remarked to her. She offered no comment. She was safer keeping silent. If he knew she suspected he was onto her, any response would sound forced. If she’d misread him, no harm done. He knew that he could expect nothing from her.
The colonel did not touch her except to take her upper arm occasionally to assist her over a rough spot on the pebbly path. The afternoon was still cold, but it felt almost balmy after the miserably frigid and wet weather of previous weeks. Any other time, with anyone else, Victoria would have enjoyed the pastoral getaway from the grimness of Paris.
At the crest of the hill they stopped to admire the sweeping view. “This place reminds me of my ancestral home in Germany, the reason I enjoy coming here,” Derrick said in English. “Have you ever been to Germany, Victoria?”
“No,” she said.
“My home is in Franconia in Bavaria, thought of as the land of sausage, beer, and lederhosen, but it is so much more than that.” He spoke with nostalgia, his gaze wistful on the sweeping vista before them. “The region is the most beautiful in Germany, possibly in all of Europe. It is an area of alps and lakes and striking castles and towering rock structures that date back to the Jurassic age. Our lovely little villages and gardens are so picturesque, postcards can’t do them justice.”
“You sound homesick,” Victoria commented.
“I hope to return to it after the war, perhaps never to leave it again…one way or the other.”
Victoria could not resist asking, “You don’t plan to stay in the SS, help your Führer crack the whip to ensure the thousand-year reign of the Third Reich?”
“There will be no SS. There will be no Führer. There will be no Third Reich.” He turned to her with a thin smile. “Shall we go back? The fire should be going by now.”
He had never spoken so directly of his feelings about the future that Hitler envisioned for Germany, although Victoria had come to believe that he did not share the maniac’s delusion. But was the colonel’s blunt, seditious opinion meant to put her off guard? She studied him in silence for a moment until the peace and quiet were suddenly shattered by the roar of a motor engine racing up the road toward the folly. They turned to see, skimming along the border of hedgerows, an SS staff car with its red-and-black Nazi flag whipping from the antennae and its back seat occupied by two uniformed officers. Victoria went numb. She should have known. They had come for her. This had all been a game.
“Let’s go,” the colonel ordered tersely and gripped her arm. One of the car’s passengers, a major, hurriedly disembarked from the vehicle and came flapping toward them in his leather coat. They met halfway. The usual stiff-armed salutes and Heil Hitlers were exchanged, and the major, grim-faced, glanced toward Victoria. In German he asked, “May I speak freely, Herr Colonel?”
“Yes, my companion does not comprehend German.”
There followed a rapid trade of questions and answers while Victoria, limp with relief, stepped away from the men to admire the view but within hearing range of their conversation, unaware that she was recording every word of crucial intel they spoke. After a while, the colonel broke off from the major and stepped to Victoria. “My deepest apologies, mademoiselle,” he said in French, “but we must get back to Paris immediately. An emergency has arisen.”
“A pity,” she said. “I was so looking forward to the fried chicken.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Monday afternoon of the following week, November 16, as Louis Mueller was preparing to leave for the day, he heard the outer door of the Sorbonne bang open and the loud rush of feet toward the entrance of the staff offices. Startled before he had time to become frightened, Louis popped up from his desk at the appearance of three men wearing the slouch hats and ankle-length black cowhide coats of the German Gestapo charging into the school facility. One spotted the astonished Louis in his glass-enclosed office and led the march through his door to confront the sports director, who was staring at them openmouthed. The Gestapo spokesman held an envelope in his hand.
“Herr Louis Mueller?”
Louis swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“You’re under arrest for sodomy!”
Louis’s face bloomed a tomato red. “What?”
Chris and the other instructors who had not yet left for the day peered out their cubicle doors to investigate the source of the disturbance. The leader of the black-coated pack slapped the envelope onto the sports director’s desk. “Are you the man in these photos?”
Eyes bulging, cheeks pulsing like bellows, Louis picked up the envelope and slowly withdrew a number of photographs. He nodded meekly. “Yes.”
“Come with me!”
Rough hands seized him and lugged him from his office under the astounded gazes of the lingering staff and arriving janitorial crew. Before being yanked over the threshold of his fiefdom that he would never see again, Louis threw a wild-eyed look at Claus Bauer watching from his cubicle door. Their gazes locked. Chris kept his perfectly still, with not a hint of guile in it, but Louis’s flared in shocked recognition of his denouncer as he was dragged away screaming by the men in whose hands he had planned to deliver Claus Bauer.
A drop-jawed instructor next to Chris said, “Herr Mueller, a queer? Whoever would have guessed?”
“Whoever indeed?” said Claus Bauer.
*
Derrick finished composing his note to Victoria Grayson and affixed the seal of his family crest to the flap of the envelope. It contained his written apology for cutting their picnic short yesterday and an invitation to make it up to her by taking her on another drive through the countryside to a small inn that offered spectacular views and served the finest lemon sole in France. Would she be free this Friday, November 20? Enclosed was a telephone number where he could be reached. After summoning Karl to arrange a courier to deliver it to the fencing school this Monday morning, Derrick settled back in satisfaction to finish his coffee.
Victoria Grayson had taken the bait and proved beyond doubt that she was a spy. Now he hoped whoever she was working for would swallow it as well. The whole dramatic scene at the folly had been staged as a setup to lure her to make contact with whomever she was working for. Upon their return to Paris, excusing himself for a matter of urgency, Derrick had instructed Karl to take him to his headquarters first before driving Mademoiselle Colbert to her residence. He’d then gone to his rooms at the Crillon to await the report from his wolfhound, now in place to follow her as soon as she left the hotel. No one was more skilled at shadowing than his longtime investigator. Derrick had not been surprised to see the man’s face fall as he gave him his instructions. Though Derrick trusted him and Karl above all men, the confidences he shared with them were limited to a need-to-know basis. Neither ever questioned his orders or asked for information beyond what they were given, but like all men after having seen Victoria Grayson, his wolfhound was saddened that such a beautiful woman should fall under the suspicion of the counterintelligence head of the Sicherheitsdienst.
The sun had gone and a fire had been lit by the time his man knocked on the door of his private quarters. Derrick had a whiskey waiting. His wolfhound took it gratefully. “You were correct, Mein Colonel,” he said. “Mademoiselle Colbert left her hotel almost immediately after her return and took the metro to Saint-Michel. At a house on Rue des Soeurs de Charité, next to the convent for which the street is named, I saw her slide a note through the mail slot, then she returned to her hotel.”
Derrick nodded. “A dead-letter box. Any further observations?”
“A curious item. Some artist has drawn an astonishing mural on the convent’s courtyard wall attached to the house. It’s become a street attraction, apparently. A small group of Sunday strollers were gathered round.”
“A mural of what?”
“A tropical scene. Blue water and seabirds and lily pads and other aquatic elements. There’s a dog, too, and some dragonflies flitting about. Quite lovely. Quite peaceful. A pleasure to view.”
“I doubt one has anything to do with the other, but it’s worth watching. I’ll put a man on the street immediately.” Derrick offered his whiskey glass for a toast. “Good work.”
“I am honored to serve, Mein Colonel,” his wolfhound said, crystal rims ringing in the firelit room.
Now Derrick had to wait until time for Victoria’s contact to react to her intelligence report. Derrick had chosen the target to eliminate the improbability that she reported to someone within the Nazi Party. If the chosen target remained untouched, Derrick would know that Victoria’s contact was a member of an Allied intelligence agency. His bet was still on the OSS. It was an organization not easily deceived, and for some time Derrick had suspected that it was onto the game that he and Konrad were playing against the Third Reich.
Derrick had decided not to share his suspicions of Victoria Grayson with his coconspirator. For her safety, there was no need for Konrad to know. His friend was already in danger because of his association with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Rumor was that Heinrich Himmler’s vultures were beginning to circle over the admiral’s head, and Derrick feared that whatever befell Canaris would befall his mentee. What his friend did not know, he could not betray.
The buzz of his desk intercom interrupted his ruminations. “Yes, Karl?”
“Chief Detective Maurice Corbett and an associate of the criminal investigation department of the French National Police are here to see you, Colonel.”
Derrick stiffened. What the devil were they back for? He’d thought they were through with their questions. “Send them in, Karl, but make it clear that I can give them only a few minutes.” He stood as they entered, the fledgling detective and his superior, the middle-aged police veteran whose deeply lined face appeared to have been stitched back together after falling apart at one point in his lifetime.
Well-seasoned, that one, Karl had commented after the man’s earlier visit. And wily as a fox, too, Derrick had judged, a man not to be underestimated. The men removed their hats as they approached the desk, the junior officer’s eyes sweeping the office nervously.
“To what do I owe the honor again, gentlemen?” Derrick asked.
Chief detective Maurice Corbett removed several blown-up photographs from a manila envelope. “We’re sorry to bother you again, Colonel Albrecht, but I wonder if you wouldn’t mind identifying this young woman for us.” He spread the two photographs on the desk. They were of Derrick and Victoria Grayson seated at a table at the Ritz the first Sunday they met.
A chill swooped over Derrick. He forced up a smile and answered casually, “Why, yes, the young woman’s name is Mademoiselle Veronique Colbert. She is a fencing instructor of foil at L’Ecole d’Escrime Français.”
“How do you know her?”
“She’s my fencing partner.” Derrick sharpened his voice. “Now would you mind telling me how and where you got these?”
“Not at all. We found them in Monsieur Fournier’s home in a hidden folder containing other photos showing persons of importance in compromising situations.”
“Are you suggesting the man was a blackmailer?”
“It is an explanation we’re considering at this point.”
“Why in the world would he have included photos of Mademoiselle Colbert and me? We were having a meal at the Ritz after a bout,” Derrick said, looking annoyed. He added nothing further. As a trained interrogator, he knew not to volunteer more information than was necessary to emphasize his innocence, a sure indication that he had something to hide.
“I am sure I don’t know. We were hoping you could tell us.”
Derrick said coldly, “There is nothing to tell. Perhaps Monsieur Fournier took the pictures to hold for the day there might be, but I can’t imagine what. The reason is obvious, but valueless. At the time that picture was taken, neither Mademoiselle Colbert nor I were, and are still not, committed to other people.”
Unless, thought Derrick suddenly, the folder included information on how the swine happened to know Victoria Grayson. He allowed a smile to skim his lips, totally without humor. “I might add, Detective, that it would be very dangerous business to attempt to blackmail the SS chief of the French counterintelligence division of the security services of the Reichsführer.”
The senior officer returned the photos to the envelope. “Precisely my deduction, Colonel,” he said, dipping his head respectfully. “We won’t trouble you further. Good day.”
For a moment after the door closed, Derrick stood chewing his lip. He didn’t dare go to the fencing school to warn Victoria to be prepared for a police interview. Detective Corbett would be anticipating that move. He picked up the phone and placed a call on his secure line to L’Ecole d’Escrime Français.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Alistair, known around the OSS station in Bern as the man who never slept, ate, or left his desk, received and acted on Victoria’s information with such speed and attention that, despite cigarettes becoming less available by the day, he allowed his Lucky Strike to burn to ashes in its tray. A Nazi informant in a Maquis cell had slipped word to the SD of plans to raid in two days’ time a German radio receiver station set up in an unobtrusive farmhouse on the sea cliffs of Le Havre. This receiver was responsible for the loss of many RAF aircraft, as well as giving the Germans early warnings of Allied ships and planes approaching the coast of Western Europe. Colonel Derrick Albrecht’s job was to arrange for an SS reception committee to thwart the raid and round up the saboteurs. Alistair’s job was to alert the Maquis of the trap.
Task now complete. The Resistance fighters had been warned off, and the SS would have its men in position to repel an assault that would never come. Liverwort’s intel had saved the lives of the brave partisans who would now live to attack another day. Alistair should be thankful for the miracle of Dragonfly’s successful deflections of the threats to their covers these past weeks, sparing him that coronary he expected to suffer before he got them out. In three cases, the sure risks to their safety had been permanently eliminated, one by his hand, the others unknown. The policeman, Achim Fleischer, was no longer a danger to Bridgette, nor Dirk Drechsler to Bucky, nor Louis Mueller to Chris. Chris and Brad had missed the swivel of Major General March’s eye when some other poor devil confessed to the theft of the classified list of German agents working in the UK. So for the time being, his chicks were free to continue to run.
“It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you, now would it?” He held out his arm. “Shall we go?”
“Where to?”
“Part of the surprise.”
With Karl at the wheel and the top of the staff car lowered to allow the sun on their faces, Victoria watched Paris slip by with growing unease. It was one thing to be an American innocent caught behind enemy lines, quite another to be caught as an American spy. “Where is Karl taking us?” she asked when they entered the countryside. She pretended casual disinterest, but she could not hear the wind for the drum of her heartbeat in her ears.
“Part of the surprise. Enjoy the ride,” he answered.
Because it would be her last? Victoria glanced at his profile, stoic, unreadable. Perhaps it was the civilian clothes, but he seemed a different person from the man she knew, a stranger, even. She much preferred him in his military uniform, a cobra out in the open rather than a rattlesnake camouflaged in the bush. He held his head slightly back, his face tilted to the sun, and did not speak as the car sped along, seemingly interested only in the pleasure of the sunlit day.
After a five-mile drive, her heart rate increased when Karl turned through a pair of majestic gateposts flanking the entrance to a road that wandered darkly through an evergreen forest. A few hundred meters later it forked off between a storybook chateau atop a far hill and a stone folly in the opposite direction. Karl took the road toward the folly.
The colonel spoke for the first time. “Count Darold Archambault’s country estate. He and his family have retired to Switzerland for the duration of the war.”
Haven’t they all? Victoria thought and wondered numbly if the duke had confiscated it for his own use. Ancestral strongholds like the count’s held dungeons.
In Victoria’s experience, follies were usually erected by people who wished it known that they had money to waste on nothing. This one at least had value in that it overlooked gently rolling acres that reminded her of the green splendor of English downs. It was enclosed except for its front and back entrances and came equipped with a stone slab table with benches on either side and a fireplace stacked with wood.
“Karl, if you will do the honors,” Colonel Albrecht instructed in German, gesturing toward the trunk, and offered a hand to Victoria to help her from the back seat. “A perfect place for a picnic, no?” he said in French.
“A picnic?”
“Of the American variety. I had it prepared especially for you. Fried chicken and potato salad. Apple pie for dessert, a taste of home.”
“That’s the surprise?”
“Yes. Are you pleased? You looked…frightened when I first suggested a surprise. What did you think—that I had something else of a more nefarious nature in mind? Now why ever would you assume that?” There was a light in his eye—playful, ironical. Was he toying with her? Victoria felt another roll of unease. Something definitely was going on here.
“Can you blame me? I never know what to expect from you, Colonel Albrecht.”
“Derrick, please. Have we not agreed to first names, and have I not assured you that you have nothing to fear from me? Come, let us walk while Karl prepares the fire and table.”
The colonel walked toward a snow-covered crest still holding some of its green against the approaching winter. The forest, deep and dark, the trees’ outer branches sparkling with snow, stood guard behind it while a swath of open country threaded with a winding creek lay before it. The frosty country air smelled fresh and sharp, carrying scents of pines and clean water, and Victoria drew in a halting breath to steady her nerves as they walked along.
“That breath had a shudder to it,” Derrick commented, and observed before she could respond, “This is a rather wonderful place, isn’t it? I must bring you here in warmer days. The valley is blindingly green in the spring.”
Victoria glanced at him. He spoke of a future, but he was a master at psychological manipulation—The best interrogator we have without resorting to…other methods, an SS colleague once remarked to her. She offered no comment. She was safer keeping silent. If he knew she suspected he was onto her, any response would sound forced. If she’d misread him, no harm done. He knew that he could expect nothing from her.
The colonel did not touch her except to take her upper arm occasionally to assist her over a rough spot on the pebbly path. The afternoon was still cold, but it felt almost balmy after the miserably frigid and wet weather of previous weeks. Any other time, with anyone else, Victoria would have enjoyed the pastoral getaway from the grimness of Paris.
At the crest of the hill they stopped to admire the sweeping view. “This place reminds me of my ancestral home in Germany, the reason I enjoy coming here,” Derrick said in English. “Have you ever been to Germany, Victoria?”
“No,” she said.
“My home is in Franconia in Bavaria, thought of as the land of sausage, beer, and lederhosen, but it is so much more than that.” He spoke with nostalgia, his gaze wistful on the sweeping vista before them. “The region is the most beautiful in Germany, possibly in all of Europe. It is an area of alps and lakes and striking castles and towering rock structures that date back to the Jurassic age. Our lovely little villages and gardens are so picturesque, postcards can’t do them justice.”
“You sound homesick,” Victoria commented.
“I hope to return to it after the war, perhaps never to leave it again…one way or the other.”
Victoria could not resist asking, “You don’t plan to stay in the SS, help your Führer crack the whip to ensure the thousand-year reign of the Third Reich?”
“There will be no SS. There will be no Führer. There will be no Third Reich.” He turned to her with a thin smile. “Shall we go back? The fire should be going by now.”
He had never spoken so directly of his feelings about the future that Hitler envisioned for Germany, although Victoria had come to believe that he did not share the maniac’s delusion. But was the colonel’s blunt, seditious opinion meant to put her off guard? She studied him in silence for a moment until the peace and quiet were suddenly shattered by the roar of a motor engine racing up the road toward the folly. They turned to see, skimming along the border of hedgerows, an SS staff car with its red-and-black Nazi flag whipping from the antennae and its back seat occupied by two uniformed officers. Victoria went numb. She should have known. They had come for her. This had all been a game.
“Let’s go,” the colonel ordered tersely and gripped her arm. One of the car’s passengers, a major, hurriedly disembarked from the vehicle and came flapping toward them in his leather coat. They met halfway. The usual stiff-armed salutes and Heil Hitlers were exchanged, and the major, grim-faced, glanced toward Victoria. In German he asked, “May I speak freely, Herr Colonel?”
“Yes, my companion does not comprehend German.”
There followed a rapid trade of questions and answers while Victoria, limp with relief, stepped away from the men to admire the view but within hearing range of their conversation, unaware that she was recording every word of crucial intel they spoke. After a while, the colonel broke off from the major and stepped to Victoria. “My deepest apologies, mademoiselle,” he said in French, “but we must get back to Paris immediately. An emergency has arisen.”
“A pity,” she said. “I was so looking forward to the fried chicken.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Monday afternoon of the following week, November 16, as Louis Mueller was preparing to leave for the day, he heard the outer door of the Sorbonne bang open and the loud rush of feet toward the entrance of the staff offices. Startled before he had time to become frightened, Louis popped up from his desk at the appearance of three men wearing the slouch hats and ankle-length black cowhide coats of the German Gestapo charging into the school facility. One spotted the astonished Louis in his glass-enclosed office and led the march through his door to confront the sports director, who was staring at them openmouthed. The Gestapo spokesman held an envelope in his hand.
“Herr Louis Mueller?”
Louis swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“You’re under arrest for sodomy!”
Louis’s face bloomed a tomato red. “What?”
Chris and the other instructors who had not yet left for the day peered out their cubicle doors to investigate the source of the disturbance. The leader of the black-coated pack slapped the envelope onto the sports director’s desk. “Are you the man in these photos?”
Eyes bulging, cheeks pulsing like bellows, Louis picked up the envelope and slowly withdrew a number of photographs. He nodded meekly. “Yes.”
“Come with me!”
Rough hands seized him and lugged him from his office under the astounded gazes of the lingering staff and arriving janitorial crew. Before being yanked over the threshold of his fiefdom that he would never see again, Louis threw a wild-eyed look at Claus Bauer watching from his cubicle door. Their gazes locked. Chris kept his perfectly still, with not a hint of guile in it, but Louis’s flared in shocked recognition of his denouncer as he was dragged away screaming by the men in whose hands he had planned to deliver Claus Bauer.
A drop-jawed instructor next to Chris said, “Herr Mueller, a queer? Whoever would have guessed?”
“Whoever indeed?” said Claus Bauer.
*
Derrick finished composing his note to Victoria Grayson and affixed the seal of his family crest to the flap of the envelope. It contained his written apology for cutting their picnic short yesterday and an invitation to make it up to her by taking her on another drive through the countryside to a small inn that offered spectacular views and served the finest lemon sole in France. Would she be free this Friday, November 20? Enclosed was a telephone number where he could be reached. After summoning Karl to arrange a courier to deliver it to the fencing school this Monday morning, Derrick settled back in satisfaction to finish his coffee.
Victoria Grayson had taken the bait and proved beyond doubt that she was a spy. Now he hoped whoever she was working for would swallow it as well. The whole dramatic scene at the folly had been staged as a setup to lure her to make contact with whomever she was working for. Upon their return to Paris, excusing himself for a matter of urgency, Derrick had instructed Karl to take him to his headquarters first before driving Mademoiselle Colbert to her residence. He’d then gone to his rooms at the Crillon to await the report from his wolfhound, now in place to follow her as soon as she left the hotel. No one was more skilled at shadowing than his longtime investigator. Derrick had not been surprised to see the man’s face fall as he gave him his instructions. Though Derrick trusted him and Karl above all men, the confidences he shared with them were limited to a need-to-know basis. Neither ever questioned his orders or asked for information beyond what they were given, but like all men after having seen Victoria Grayson, his wolfhound was saddened that such a beautiful woman should fall under the suspicion of the counterintelligence head of the Sicherheitsdienst.
The sun had gone and a fire had been lit by the time his man knocked on the door of his private quarters. Derrick had a whiskey waiting. His wolfhound took it gratefully. “You were correct, Mein Colonel,” he said. “Mademoiselle Colbert left her hotel almost immediately after her return and took the metro to Saint-Michel. At a house on Rue des Soeurs de Charité, next to the convent for which the street is named, I saw her slide a note through the mail slot, then she returned to her hotel.”
Derrick nodded. “A dead-letter box. Any further observations?”
“A curious item. Some artist has drawn an astonishing mural on the convent’s courtyard wall attached to the house. It’s become a street attraction, apparently. A small group of Sunday strollers were gathered round.”
“A mural of what?”
“A tropical scene. Blue water and seabirds and lily pads and other aquatic elements. There’s a dog, too, and some dragonflies flitting about. Quite lovely. Quite peaceful. A pleasure to view.”
“I doubt one has anything to do with the other, but it’s worth watching. I’ll put a man on the street immediately.” Derrick offered his whiskey glass for a toast. “Good work.”
“I am honored to serve, Mein Colonel,” his wolfhound said, crystal rims ringing in the firelit room.
Now Derrick had to wait until time for Victoria’s contact to react to her intelligence report. Derrick had chosen the target to eliminate the improbability that she reported to someone within the Nazi Party. If the chosen target remained untouched, Derrick would know that Victoria’s contact was a member of an Allied intelligence agency. His bet was still on the OSS. It was an organization not easily deceived, and for some time Derrick had suspected that it was onto the game that he and Konrad were playing against the Third Reich.
Derrick had decided not to share his suspicions of Victoria Grayson with his coconspirator. For her safety, there was no need for Konrad to know. His friend was already in danger because of his association with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Rumor was that Heinrich Himmler’s vultures were beginning to circle over the admiral’s head, and Derrick feared that whatever befell Canaris would befall his mentee. What his friend did not know, he could not betray.
The buzz of his desk intercom interrupted his ruminations. “Yes, Karl?”
“Chief Detective Maurice Corbett and an associate of the criminal investigation department of the French National Police are here to see you, Colonel.”
Derrick stiffened. What the devil were they back for? He’d thought they were through with their questions. “Send them in, Karl, but make it clear that I can give them only a few minutes.” He stood as they entered, the fledgling detective and his superior, the middle-aged police veteran whose deeply lined face appeared to have been stitched back together after falling apart at one point in his lifetime.
Well-seasoned, that one, Karl had commented after the man’s earlier visit. And wily as a fox, too, Derrick had judged, a man not to be underestimated. The men removed their hats as they approached the desk, the junior officer’s eyes sweeping the office nervously.
“To what do I owe the honor again, gentlemen?” Derrick asked.
Chief detective Maurice Corbett removed several blown-up photographs from a manila envelope. “We’re sorry to bother you again, Colonel Albrecht, but I wonder if you wouldn’t mind identifying this young woman for us.” He spread the two photographs on the desk. They were of Derrick and Victoria Grayson seated at a table at the Ritz the first Sunday they met.
A chill swooped over Derrick. He forced up a smile and answered casually, “Why, yes, the young woman’s name is Mademoiselle Veronique Colbert. She is a fencing instructor of foil at L’Ecole d’Escrime Français.”
“How do you know her?”
“She’s my fencing partner.” Derrick sharpened his voice. “Now would you mind telling me how and where you got these?”
“Not at all. We found them in Monsieur Fournier’s home in a hidden folder containing other photos showing persons of importance in compromising situations.”
“Are you suggesting the man was a blackmailer?”
“It is an explanation we’re considering at this point.”
“Why in the world would he have included photos of Mademoiselle Colbert and me? We were having a meal at the Ritz after a bout,” Derrick said, looking annoyed. He added nothing further. As a trained interrogator, he knew not to volunteer more information than was necessary to emphasize his innocence, a sure indication that he had something to hide.
“I am sure I don’t know. We were hoping you could tell us.”
Derrick said coldly, “There is nothing to tell. Perhaps Monsieur Fournier took the pictures to hold for the day there might be, but I can’t imagine what. The reason is obvious, but valueless. At the time that picture was taken, neither Mademoiselle Colbert nor I were, and are still not, committed to other people.”
Unless, thought Derrick suddenly, the folder included information on how the swine happened to know Victoria Grayson. He allowed a smile to skim his lips, totally without humor. “I might add, Detective, that it would be very dangerous business to attempt to blackmail the SS chief of the French counterintelligence division of the security services of the Reichsführer.”
The senior officer returned the photos to the envelope. “Precisely my deduction, Colonel,” he said, dipping his head respectfully. “We won’t trouble you further. Good day.”
For a moment after the door closed, Derrick stood chewing his lip. He didn’t dare go to the fencing school to warn Victoria to be prepared for a police interview. Detective Corbett would be anticipating that move. He picked up the phone and placed a call on his secure line to L’Ecole d’Escrime Français.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Alistair, known around the OSS station in Bern as the man who never slept, ate, or left his desk, received and acted on Victoria’s information with such speed and attention that, despite cigarettes becoming less available by the day, he allowed his Lucky Strike to burn to ashes in its tray. A Nazi informant in a Maquis cell had slipped word to the SD of plans to raid in two days’ time a German radio receiver station set up in an unobtrusive farmhouse on the sea cliffs of Le Havre. This receiver was responsible for the loss of many RAF aircraft, as well as giving the Germans early warnings of Allied ships and planes approaching the coast of Western Europe. Colonel Derrick Albrecht’s job was to arrange for an SS reception committee to thwart the raid and round up the saboteurs. Alistair’s job was to alert the Maquis of the trap.
Task now complete. The Resistance fighters had been warned off, and the SS would have its men in position to repel an assault that would never come. Liverwort’s intel had saved the lives of the brave partisans who would now live to attack another day. Alistair should be thankful for the miracle of Dragonfly’s successful deflections of the threats to their covers these past weeks, sparing him that coronary he expected to suffer before he got them out. In three cases, the sure risks to their safety had been permanently eliminated, one by his hand, the others unknown. The policeman, Achim Fleischer, was no longer a danger to Bridgette, nor Dirk Drechsler to Bucky, nor Louis Mueller to Chris. Chris and Brad had missed the swivel of Major General March’s eye when some other poor devil confessed to the theft of the classified list of German agents working in the UK. So for the time being, his chicks were free to continue to run.
