Three Hours in Paris

by Cara Black

  She felt his fluttering pulse and shook him. No response. “Wake up, engineer.”

  A moan. She slapped him.

  His eyes opened. “D-d-don’t you understand, you cow?”

  The most lucid he’d sounded yet. “I understand you won’t make it anywhere if you won’t lie still,” she said.

  Desperate for him to pull through, she applied pressure again to the wound and noticed the wedding band on his fourth finger. With her other hand she felt around in his leather jacket. All she found in the pocket was a black-and-white photo. In it a light-haired woman perched on a horse, squinting in the sun.

  “Is this your wife?”

  “My . . . darling Pippa.” A weak smile broke over his face.

  “See, you’re almost nice when you smile,” she said. “Tell me why you have to go to the Grand Palais.”

  “Antoine . . . the plans.”

  His eyes fluttered closed. His breath came in shallow beats. The pallor in his cheeks had a gray tinge. His forehead felt hot again.

  Where was the damn butcher?

  Mumbled conversations drifted from an adjoining courtyard. Horses neighed below.

  A deep hooting sound startled her. She sat up and locked eyes with a pair of unblinking yellow ones in the rafters. It took a moment before she realized they belonged to a barn owl.

  Her father had always said owls took care of the barn mice. But here in Paris?

  She heard the wooden ladder creaking. The butcher’s head appeared above a clump of hay. The look on his face was unreadable.

  “My son’s saddling up the cart.” He glanced at the man. “How is he?”

  “Fever’s still high.”

  “We need to move him. There’s patrols.”

  Before she could argue he was gone again.

  “Hear that, engineer?” she said. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”

  She put her shoulder under his arm.

  “The buoy locations,” he said, a strange lucidity in his eyes. “The invasion plans. Antoine’s . . . arranged my escape. A barge.”

  Blood bubbles streamed in a thin line from his mouth.

  “What about buoy locations?” Her heart hammered. He had to tell her. He had to survive. “Swan?” She felt his pulse—thin and reedy.

  “Look, I need a little more information here if I’m going to get us out of this. Does Antoine have the plans?” She stroked his face as his eyes slid closed. “Don’t leave me, engineer. Not yet, engineer, please.” She felt the life ebbing from him. “You hear me, engineer?” She slapped him again. “Swan. Swan! Goddamn it, answer me.”

  His eyes blinked open. “Directive 17.”

  His body went limp, his mouth falling open. The fly alighted on his pupil but he didn’t blink.

  Terrified, she shooed away the fly. She remembered what her father had done the time her brother fell off the roof, straddling him and pumping his chest until his heart started again on its own. It worked magic—it had seemed to Kate that her brother lurched awake from the dead. Kate folded her hands together, prayed and thrust hard into his chest, then again.

  But he was gone.

  Gasping, she fell back.

  The owl hooted again. There was a whooshing of wings as it flew across the barn and out the door.

  The butcher had appeared and shook his head. “We say a hooting owl bids adieu to a departing soul.”

  Shuddering, she blinked away tears. Was the owl an omen? Was she cursed? Her mother, Dafydd and Lisbeth, and now this engineer, whom she desperately needed to have kept alive.

  “There are new German patrols,” the butcher said, closing the engineer’s eyes. “You have to hurry.”

  “Why?” she asked, her voice hollow.

  “We must bury him before they find him here.”

  “You want me to bury him?”

  The butcher’s rough hand gripped her shoulders. “Not you. You must go, mademoiselle. Get yourself out of here. Escape.”

  She stared in shock at the man’s blood on her hands. Escape . . .

  “How?”

  The butcher took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Now. We don’t have much time.” His gaze bore into hers.

  Galvanized, she wiped her hands on the blanket. Watching the butcher gather the engineer’s few things and stick them in the small rucksack, Kate wondered how important Swan and his mission could be. What could he have meant about buoys? All she knew was that he was meeting someone named Antoine, whom he’d known in Birmingham, at the Grand Palais. She didn’t know when, or why, or what information was being passed.

  But she did know that there was a barge waiting to take him away after. If she completed his mission for him, would they let her make use of his escape route?

  Down in the stable, she washed her hands, then stuck her head under the water pump and washed off the sweat, the blood. Toweled her hair with the hem of the skirt. The butcher’s son was helping his father load the body into the cart.

  She climbed in the horse cart behind the butcher and his son, a gangling teenager in overalls. Next to her lay the engineer’s covered body and his bag. The canal’s expanse reflected the sun’s orange evening glow. A time when it wasn’t day or night, reminding her it wouldn’t get dark for about another two hours. She breathed in the algae-scented air.

  Guilt and sorrow nagged at her. There’d been no way she could have saved him—even if she’d had better medical knowledge, she was almost certain he’d already been too far gone. The cart lumbered along the bank amid the chirps of crickets. The cart’s hay scents mingled with the reek of ship oil. She checked the engineer’s bag: a compass, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter—all regulation items. His wife’s photo. But where were his papers? She didn’t even know his name. Would “Swan” be enough for her to fake her way through this?

  She remembered his agitated disjointed words, how he wanted her to understand.

  Invasion . . . buoy locations . . . plans . . . Grand Palais . . . Antoine . . . barge . . . escape.

  And his last words: Directive 17.

  She needed something else to go on—some clue as to what she should do next. She replayed every word and interaction that had passed between them, remembered how every time she’d tried to get him to lie still his arms had flailed in the hay, reaching. She’d assumed he was thirsty, that he was reaching for the wine. Never assume, Stepney had drilled into her.

  What if he’d been reaching for something else in the hay? But what? There was nothing in his bag. She checked his leather headgear. Nothing. She took the leather jacket from the bag, fished around in the empty pockets, then squeezed the lining in case there was anything hidden inside. She felt an unusual thickness in the collar band, stiff with whatever had been tightly stitched inside. Something was encased inside. Using her fingernails, she tried picking the stitches, then when that failed, biting the threads open.

  “Shhh, the patrol’s nearby,” said the butcher, looking over his shoulder. “Keep low.”

  She nodded. Picking away quietly at the threads with her teeth, she finally tore them and was able to rip apart the leather jacket’s collar.

  She threw a blanket over herself, took the lighter from his bag. In the flickering flame, she saw a folded piece of silk with uneven contours. She unfolded the silk, what appeared to be a neck scarf stitched with old-fashioned beading, like one of her aunt’s old scarves. It was hard to believe this much silk had been wadded into such a narrow collar. Peering closer, she realized it was one of those tourist scarves imprinted with a large Eiffel tower. The beads were tightly stitched along the edges. Tacky.

  She raised the blanket for air. A barge was passing. In the summer evening light, the scarf looked even more tacky, its cheap glass beads glittering.

  Then again, they were catching significant sparkle. Glass didn’t sparkle like that.


  Her jaw dropped. How dumb could she be?

  Diamonds.

  The scarf was stitched with diamonds. This was what the engineer must have been reaching for. Was this what he had to get to Antoine? Her mind scrambled. It must be a bribe, or a payment of some kind—it must have been for information. Information about the German invasion? Something about buoy locations? If she could salvage his mission, make the exchange, this could be her way out.

  Directive 17.

  She folded the scarf and wedged it deep inside the apron’s pocket, then pulled the blanket off. About to stuff the pocket compass back into the engineer’s bag, she noticed the compass was heavier than the one her pa used tracking and hunting. She remembered Stepney had a similar one on his desk.

  She fiddled with the casing. The bumpy cart jolted on the cobblestones, making her hand slip. She kept pressing and scraping at the compass’s contours until her thumb hit a button. The compass’s face popped off. Inside was a tiny Minox Riga camera, like one she’d seen in training. A spy camera—lightweight aluminum, only the length of her index finger. The Minox Riga’s tiny window showed the number one. Ready to take a picture.

  The cart was slowing down. She slipped the Minox back into the compass and into her pocket.

  The butcher gave her a hand down from the cart. “You’re on your own from here. We’re taking the body to bury. Curfew’s at ten.” He pointed to a beat-up bike leaning on the quai’s fence. “Use that.” He stuck a note in her pocket. “Read it later. Not now. Bonne chance.”

  He sounded almost friendly. Maybe death drew people together.

  Her mind clicked into action. Somehow she’d track down Antoine, whoever he was. This time she wouldn’t fail. The engineer had died for this mission. She prayed she wouldn’t, too.

  Sunday, June 23, 1940

  Near Canal Saint-Martin, Paris | 7:30 p.m. Paris Time

  Gunter’s eyes accustomed themselves to the dim light in the concierge loge to the right of the apartment’s courtyard. It contained only a bed, table and one gas burner, a rack on the wall with a row of keys hanging under corresponding tenant names. This place felt like a dark stone cave and exuded the smell of cooking oil.

  The concierge, a fifty-something woman, short and rotund in a shapeless smock, eyed him, expressionless. Her left eye had a milky cast. Hair straggled from her bun.

  “Papers,” said Gunter, reaching out his hand.

  The concierge pulled a carte d’identité from her grease-stained pocket. Gunter glanced at the papers.

  “Madelaine Tremont?”

  A nod.

  “Where were you born?”

  “Around the corner. Forty-two quai de Valmy.”

  Her gaze darted to Niels, then Karl out in the courtyard sizing up the situation. She knew something.

  Gunter slid fifty francs and the drawing of the Englishwoman into her hands. “Seen this woman?”

  The fifty francs disappeared into her pocket. Another nod.

  “When?”

  A shrug. “This afternoon. Asking about Madame Masson. She’s second floor on the right.”

  Gunter reached for the keys of a Gilberte Masson. “This apartment?”

  Another nod. “And I never saw her leave.”

  Sunday, June 23, 1940

  Grand Palais, Paris | 8:10 p.m. Paris Time

  Kate cycled down side streets on the butcher’s beat-up bike. The quiet of the warm evening was punctuated by bells from passing bicycles and the occasional bark of a dog. In the distance, though, she heard the engine of a troop truck.

  It stayed light late in summer; she’d once thought it almost enchanted, as if the sun hadn’t wanted to sleep. Wispy clouds patterned the indigo sky. Dafydd had once explained how these clouds would turn noctilucent illuminated by the sun when it had set and gone below the horizon.

  She inhaled the linden trees’ scent and cursed as the long apron caught on the tire spokes. With unsteady nerves she tried to focus and formulate a plan. First, find Antoine; second, figure out how to complete whatever Swan’s spy mission had been so she could escape.

  But she wasn’t a spy, whatever her training. She was a sharpshooter.

  She parked the bike and walked along the gravel path toward the Grand Palais. Its arched humpback roofs were fretted by iron, joining thousands of glass panes, their dark green surfaces reflecting a furred sunlight from the sky. She wished for nightfall, for a more complete cover of darkness to hide in.

  “We’re closed,” said the guard, gesturing toward the sign. He gave her a dismissive nod, taking her for a domestic.

  Play the part, she thought.

  Men underestimate women, Stepney said. Use it.

  “Monsieur, I’m sorry to bother you. But my cousin’s attending the conference here; can you show me where it’s being held?” she said, hoping her slow inflection marked her as provincial.

  Believe.

  “What conference?” He wanted to shoo her away.

  Stricken for a moment, she wondered if she’d remembered Swan’s words all wrong. Or maybe the conference had ended. Or hadn’t begun yet—he’d said nothing about when.

  Or maybe the lazy guard was just giving her a hard time.

  “A group of engineers,” she persisted. “Here for a conference.”

  Wouldn’t it be this guard’s job to know?

  How stupid of her, she realized. A conference didn’t run at night. Unless there were evening lectures. She stared at the guard, hoping he could give her some clue. The day’s heat hovered.

  “Aah, you probably mean at the university observatory. The astronomers,” he sniffed. “In back.”

  Was that what engineers did? But she nodded. “Merci.”

  Kate spied several men smoking as she wound along an evergreen hedge toward the rear entrance. In a large foyer, stucco peeled from the arched walls. The whole place smelled of damp and mold. Several students mounted a wrought iron balustraded staircase. Her gaze caught on the conference sign: université colloquium des sciences.

  Not exactly what she’d been expecting. But close enough.

  She followed the students upstairs. Paused at the open door on the second floor. Looked around and, seeing no one, slipped inside and stood at the back.

  A group of fifty or sixty men and a few women sat in a small amphitheater, listening attentively to a white-haired man standing at a podium in front of a diagram labeled fusion process. Her heart sank. Not one of the distinguished attendees looked under fifty. How could any of them have gone to university in Birmingham with the thirtysomething man she’d met?

  The white-haired speaker droned on about les particules and des électrons and she understood nothing.

  Apprehensive, she watched the black-uniformed Germans clumped in the front row. Worried, she slunk back into the woodwork.

  RADA. Read, Assess, Decide, Act.

  An old man poured the long-winded speaker a glass of water. Took the water pitcher to refill and passed her in the doorway. She followed him to the stairway landing across from the amphitheater’s door. Smiled.

  “Excusez-moi, monsieur, would you be the conference registrar?”

  “Moi?” The white-bearded man stared at her outfit. “The conference began yesterday, everyone’s registered,” he said. Suspicion showed under his thick black eyebrows. Did she look too young or odd? “The area’s off limits to the public.”

  Act helpless.

  “You’re right, monsieur.” Kate faltered and leaned on his arm. “But I’m on a mission of mercy and with this heat, you know—and my anemia.” She sighed. “My brain’s already turned to mush.”

  “Sit down.” Concerned now, he guided her to a small spindle-back chair in the landing’s corner.

  “I’ve got a message for an attendee. His name’s Antoine. I’ve never met him, monsieur.” She gave a big sigh. “Very
sad. This comes from Rafael Santos, Professor Neliad’s assistant at the Polytechnic,” she said, ready to launch into the story she’d fabricated on the long ride. Rafael, an actual Spanish engineering student Kate had known in ’37, had become the assistant to his advisor, Professor Neliad, a short squat perfectionist Raphael had mimicked incessantly. “I hate to trouble you, monsieur, but it’s important I speak with Antoine. Please.”

  The man set down his folder, which was labeled école polytechnique.

  “But what’s so important?”

  She had to make this credible. Make him believe her.

  She sniffled and shook her head. “There’s horrible news. Antoine’s mother . . .” She paused for effect. “A terrible accident in front of her apartment. The bus . . . and Rafael saw the whole thing.” To make herself cry, she thought of the dead Swan and how the fly had settled on his sightless eye. Tears brimmed in her eyes. “Terrible.”

  “Calm yourself, I’ll fetch you some water.”

  He returned with a pitcher and poured water in a glass.

  She drank, relishing the cold liquid on her parched throat. “Merci, monsieur, you are very kind.”

  Kate’s ankles were swollen in the heat after all the running and biking. She’d forgotten how hot it got in Paris in the summer. A mildew smell wafted.

  “He’s gone to the hospital with her and sent me to fetch Antoine.”

  “But not everyone’s here right now,” the man said. “The reception’s later. Do you know his last name?”

  “Absurd, but no, Rafael forgot to tell me. Antoine’s in his late twenties, early thirties. He studied in Birmingham. Can’t you help me find him?”

  “Regardez, we’re the academics, the old crust.” He shook his head. “If you mean the research engineers, they’re upstairs with the Germans. It’s a closed session.”

  “Cooperating with the Germans?” she asked before she could bite her tongue.

  “Like anyone has a choice, mademoiselle? The day the Germans marched in they began regulating our research. They’re in the process of taking over select projects. Soon they’ll control them all. If we want to keep running our programs, we report to them.” The old man snorted in disgust. “To think I survived the trenches in 1918 to work for the Boches.”