by Cara Black
Gunter looked again at his watch. Thirty-three hours left.
He downed another pill with the last sip of coffee, then pulled out his handkerchief to wipe his runny nose. “What about a woman?”
“Eh?”
Lebel’s wife nudged him. “Tell him.”
“Never saw her.”
“But you heard something.”
Silence apart from the dripping sink faucet. “Listen to your wife. Tell me.”
Not a word.
“If you don’t talk, my boss will make sure that you do.”
Only the dripping faucet answered him.
Gunter nodded to Niels. “Handcuff Madame, take her to the car.” He pulled out his Luger.
Lebel’s eyes batted in fear. “Someone saw a woman on the milkman’s cart yesterday.”
“Here?”
“Near Noisy-le-Grand.”
“Where’s that?”
“Twenty-five kilometers away.”
“Then how do you know?”
“My brother-in-law works at the dairy cooperative,” said Lebel. “People were talking. He heard . . . a foreign woman took the early milk train to Paris. That’s all.”
Gunter nodded to Niels, who tucked the handcuffs back in his pocket. Gunter put his gun away. “Commissaire Lebel, my report’s going to reflect how the local commissariat assisted in the capture of British snipers. You’re still going to the station.”
“You expect me to thank you?” said Lebel.
“Not at all.”
“What about the dog?”
Gunter wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “Return Didine to Madame Marie. Guten Tag.”
Sunday, June 23, 1940
Right Bank, Paris | Noon Paris Time
Kate’s anxiety mounted as she bicycled through the Place de l’Opéra. The outdoor tables at Café de la Paix were jammed, the crowd speckled with German uniforms. Women with elaborately curled hair smoked, drank and laughed with the enemy. Disgusted, Kate scanned the side street, noting camouflage-painted troop trucks parked by a former bank that bore a bold German banner proclaiming platzkommandantur. Cordons and troop trucks were set up on the wide boulevard. Striped wooden sentry houses manned by bayonet-rifle-bearing soldiers stood on the corners of Place de l’Opéra. She slowed as a trio of soldiers strode into the crossing, their rifles over their shoulders glinting in the sun.
A horn tooted and she took off past the arrow signs pointing to Lille, Metz, Brussels.
Stepney had underestimated the damned German efficiency—such a pervasive military presence in place after only two weeks of occupation. Like a plague of locusts, the victors mowed down and sampled everything in their path.
At least the Germans appeared on their best behavior. They looked like tourists with their cameras and maps. She wondered if somewhere they were carrying out reprisals for her botched mission.
Now she knew where she was. She needed to concentrate on meeting the contact. Pray that the café rendezvous hadn’t been compromised. What if the meeting proved impossible? That was her only connection to her escape route. Would she ever get out of Paris?
She’d worry about that later.
Concentrate.
First: How could she stow the rifle? The train station’s left luggage counters would be watched. Lockers in the public bath, she remembered, were scrutinized by bathhouse attendants.
She parked her bike near the Palais-Royal and wiped her brow with the back of her hand. Under the arcade ringing the garden, shaded by rows of leafy plane trees, a frizzy-haired old woman bent feeding stray cats. Kate spied a full garbage bin. Among the household items discarded during the exodus from Paris, she found a wicker picnic basket with a lid and dusted it off. Perfect for the rifle. She left the straw bag and fitted the wicker basket into the blue canvas bag that had held her change of clothes at the fabric market. It only just fit.
Back on her bicycle, Kate wove through traffic consisting of vélo-taxis, bikes, buses and the occasional Mercedes. The light breeze ruffled the black flags with red swastikas that stood at every block along rue de Rivoli. Notices in French and German were plastered on the walls. Her legs still ached but she was making up time.
She crossed the Pont Royal with her picnic basket. The green-gray of the Seine was the exact shade of the Wehrmacht’s feldgrau uniforms. Her skin crawled. The pain welled up fresh as she remembered how she, very much in love, had spent a summer afternoon strolling with Dafydd below on the quai. How Dafydd had uncorked a bottle of wine and they’d celebrated his selling a drawing.
A lifetime ago.
Ten minutes later she entered le Bon Marché, the chic department store at Sèvres-Babylone, for the second time in her life. She found the cloakroom in the same place where it had been when she’d come here to shop for a birthday present for Dafydd three years earlier. She smiled at the attendant, a bored young woman, who gave her a blue claim check for her wicker basket.
Sunday, June 23, 1940
The Kommandantur, Place de l’Opéra, Paris
12:30 p.m. Paris Time
After rounding up the two other parachutists, Gunter herded them all into a troop truck from le Bourget and had them transported to Paris for questioning. He’d let them stew in holding cells. The murdered radio man’s last words rolled in his mind. Something told him the woman at the rendezvous at Café Littéraire would be the missing piece to this puzzle. Was she the assassin targeting the Führer?
But the Sorbonne would have to wait—a radioed message relayed to him at le Bourget had ordered him to the Kommandantur. Niels gunned the Mercedes and made it in record time to the building on Place de l’Opéra that the Reich had commandeered for the Kommandantur. Gunter would have to keep this appointment short if he was going to make it to that café at 1 p.m.
Kostoff, the Militärbefehlshaber of the French Reich, was barking into the phone. It was Gunter’s boss, Jäger, on the other line.
“Himmler’s livid,” Kostoff was saying.
More like frightened out of the few wits he had left, Gunter thought. He stood at less than attention in Kostoff’s half-unpacked office.
Kostoff’s polished black boots creaked as he rose to his feet behind his desk. “We uphold order and security here. I refuse to let your branch short-circuit our authority—” Kostoff paused, listening and flicking his fingernail over the blotter on his desk.
As usual, the Führer played favorites and kept his elite off balance.
“Jawohl,” Kostoff said, his voice steady now into the phone, “May I remind you we had less than two hours’ advance notice of the Führer’s visit? It took us by complete surprise.”
Exactly what the Führer had wanted.
“. . . round up civilians?” he said into the phone. “I’ve got a city to control. It’s only been two weeks; we don’t want to make the natives restless.”
Gunter, his dilemma mounting as the minutes ticked away, stared out the window at the sun-drenched boulevard below. He dreaded confrontation. He wondered how he would manage to withhold his findings from Kostoff once he’d interrogated the four English snipers.
Kostoff slammed the phone down. “Don’t you have the latest report on the sniper for me, Hoffman?”
Gunter snapped to attention. Now he knew Kostoff had been informed about the sniper and Gunter’s assignment. No wonder the Kommandant wanted to stick his finger in the investigation.
“In progress, of course, sir,” he lied. He had to tread carefully. First and foremost he reported to Jäger and the Führer. “However, the investigation’s progressing minute by minute.” Gunter was desperate to leave.
“Ach ja, Hoffman,” said Kostoff. He opened a dossier on his desk. “This sniper incident has happened on my watch, my first week in charge, as the Führer reminds me, so I’ll need you to keep me informed.”
Jäger had demanded G
unter report only to him, then had informed Kostoff of the incident himself, leaving Gunter in an awkward position of either disobeying his boss’s explicit orders or looking uncooperative to the Parisian head Kommandant. Was Jäger hedging his bets, or was the Führer demanding more immediate action?
Gunter could get dizzy wondering who played whom these days. Still, he couldn’t ignore Kostoff, and had to give him something. “You’ll have my report this afternoon, sir.”
He glanced at his watch. Thirty-two and a half hours.
“Gut. This is your case; you’re the lead investigator,” Kostoff said. “That’s understood. But from now on you’ll collaborate on the report with Roschmann’s Feldgendarmerie unit. Verstehen Sie?”
Bad to worse.
Sunday, June 23, 1940
Left Bank, Paris | 12:30 p.m. Paris Time
Stepney’s script ran through Kate’s head: always scout an exit strategy before a rendezvous. She took a bite of the nectarine. Its warm, sweet juice dribbled down her chin.
She’d arrive at the café early, prop herself behind the old book that had been in the bike’s basket and use it to observe what she could about the patrons and staff, their movements and mannerisms, get a sense of the atmosphere. When it felt safe, she would go downstairs to check for the message confirming the contact meet was on. She tried to banish the notion that she was gambling with her life. If it felt wrong, she’d get up and leave.
She pedaled past the Jardin du Luxembourg’s gold-tipped gates, over the cobbles by the blackened stone portico framing the Sorbonne’s tall wood doors, which she’d walked through countless times in the summer of ’37.
Her Paris trip had been the fault of Auntie Mae, her mother’s older sister, the old maid, as her pa called her. Kate’s father, like many Americans of his generation, had moved from job to job during the Depression, taking his five boys and Kate with him from one ranch to another. The year she spent in Medford was the longest she’d lived any one place until Orkney. Auntie Mae had insisted Kate needed some female influence in her life, and when Kate turned ten, Mae’d invited her to spend ladylike time at the boarding house she ran in Yreka. Kate’s pa had surprisingly agreed, and from then on Kate spent a whole month with Auntie Mae every summer. Kate loved the boarding house, and loved Martine, Auntie Mae’s lodger, a Parisian war bride who had ended up in Oregon after the Great War. Martine taught French, drank strong coffee and taught Kate how to apply lipstick. Inspired, Kate studied French from Martine’s old textbooks. She got good enough to win a Portland French competition, then the Oregon state final. That was how she won a scholarship from the Alliance Française to study at the Sorbonne in 1937. Her conversational French—rudimentary and old-fashioned, according to Max, her Sorbonne group tutor—had blossomed into something approaching what Parisians spoke at the café.
Down the hill she turned left on rue des Écoles and continued up to the wide boulevard Saint-Michel, detouring around le Pam Pam, the art moderne café where she and her classmates had spent afternoons over tiny cups of espresso, smoking and discussing everything. They had all been international misfits, exiles from Franco’s Spain, starving Polish artists, a Swedish cellist, an Austrian linguist—even a migrant rancher’s daughter from Oregon.
That heady summer anything had seemed possible in Paris. Even peace. Hooked, she’d thought she’d never want to leave—until she met Dafydd.
On the bustling boulevard Saint-Michel, the women wore summer dresses that floated at the slightest breeze. Lipstick, round sunglasses, their hair wrapped in turbans or waved and shoulder-length. À la mode, as usual. The Luftwaffe officers in blue uniforms with bronze gull-wing pins strolled in groups and soldiers rumbled by on motorcycles with sidecars. Paris was reawakening, but the nightmare remained. Posters displayed a photo of white-haired Marshal Pétain entreating his citoyens to cooperate. From outward appearances they obliged. Kate saw shops with hand-lettered reopening signs and notices of future ration coupon requirements in their windows. In England rationing had been in effect since January. She noticed a woman wearing silk stockings, and remembered how Greer had drawn a seam up her legs with eyebrow pencil.
The kiosk vendor sold German newspapers and magazines—Signal, Tagblatt—and the Bulletin Municipal Officiel de la Ville de Paris, as well as a single copy of Paris-Soir, reduced to a double-sided sheet. The right-wing daily’s front page announced that Mussolini threatened the French borders. She noticed the movie poster advertising a German film at the Soldatenkino. By the lamppost, German signs shaped like arrows pointed the route to the Kommandantur, the Deutsches Rotes Kruez, the Kriegsmarine.
Left Bank, Right Bank—they’d moved right in and set up shop.
Quite a few Parisians, focused on their journeys, ignored the soldiers. Kate simmered in anger at their laissez-faire attitude.
By the time she returned to Place de la Sorbonne, she’d located two escape routes that would loop back to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where she could get lost in the gardens. Now she was back at her old stomping grounds. A feeling of familiarity spread over her, lit by a flicker of hope. She’d gotten this far, hadn’t she?
At Place de la Sorbonne, her eye caught the Buchhandlung banner over the corner bookstore. The windows displayed German books instead of textbooks now. Sickened, she parked her bike near the potted hedgerow bordering the café, took a breath and shouldered her bag.
Café Littéraire’s outdoor tables opened onto the narrow rectangular Place de la Sorbonne. It was quieter than she remembered it being in ’37, when conversation had buzzed at the teeming tables. She remembered how Sorbonne students had clustered by the outside fountain, smoking and talking on the street. Now the café’s few occupants were a mix of bourgeois matrons and a professor or two.
Nothing unusual jumped out at her, but she heard Stepney’s voice warning her to be vigilant. Always vigilant. And even more so at this rendezvous, she thought, in an area she knew from her student days. There was a chance of running into someone from her past, although a remote one—the war had probably changed everything.
Looking into the café now, Kate recognized the sullen fish-eyed waiter behind the zinc counter. She doubted he’d remember her. She hadn’t spent much time in this café; her interest had always been the Latin bookstore on the other side of the square. It was still in business. She hoped the old woman who ran the musty, piled-high bookshop continued to hold court.
Kate’s heart fell as she noticed several Wehrmacht approaching the terrasse. They sat down at an outdoor table, set down their guidebooks and pointed to menus, “S’il vous plaît.” No chance they’d leave soon.
Her instructions were to sit at the third outside table, left of the entrance under the awning. The table the Wehrmacht had claimed. Just her luck.
Her hands trembled.
Breathe.
RADA. Read the situation, assess options, decide, act.
She sat down at the table nearest the window, ignoring the now smiling and polite Germans, who were attempting to order. Did they think smiling and speaking broken French made them more palatable to the occupied? How could the French stand it?
Kate had to stop letting her thoughts run wild. Too much was at stake to let emotions get in the way. She had to control her fear. And her anger. She needed to get a hold of herself. Follow the instructions—it was her only chance now. Her contact would appear when she signaled at 1 p.m. but she didn’t know if it would be someone at the café, didn’t know if it would be a man or a woman. Unease enveloped her. She couldn’t dismiss the possibility that Jean-Marie had revealed the meeting under torture. Or that whomever she was to meet had been caught.
Stay aware, she thought. Alert.
The waiter took the Wehrmacht order amid laughter and requests for beer.
She ignored them as the other patrons did and took the biography of Madame de Maintenon, mistress then morganatic queen of Louis XIV, from her bag.
She looked up at the unsmiling waiter. “Un café, s’il vous plaît,” she said quickly, keeping her voice low. She’d practiced the Parisian intonation for hours yesterday on the milk train through the countryside, to the strange looks from the conductor.
The waiter nodded curtly and gave the round marble-topped table a quick swipe with his almost-white towel. He went inside, tucking the towel back over his arm.
Now the next part of her plan. She set her book on the table and entered the dark, cool café. A workman in overalls perched at the zinc counter drinking a beer. One table was occupied by a young couple holding hands, the other by a student writing in a notebook.
Quiet reigned. Most people in these times ate lunch at home, Kate imagined.
At the rear of the café she descended the steps to the tiled lavatory composed of a public sink and a warped wooden door painted with the letters wc. A telephone cabin stood to the right of the passage leading to a back exit. All just as her instructions had described.
To the left lay a low, coved door. She tried the hook-shaped handle and it turned. She opened the door to a damp, chill mildew, the underground smell of Paris. Here she found the café wine cellar, the sewer manhole and storage. An old ring of large keys hung from a nail on the wall. From the shank of the hollowed last key, she slid out a rolled piece of paper. Blank—which meant the meet was on. Kate stuffed it in her pocket. Something skittered. Rats.
She shivered.
At the sink, she rubbed the soap-spattered mirror with her sleeve to check her face. She could almost see the bacteria on the dirty gray bar of soap stuck to a rod in the tile. Forget it.
