Three Hours in Paris

by Cara Black

  She licked sweat off her lip.

  In Loulet’s side alley, under the cracked wall covered in peeling circus posters, she found the second black bicycle on the rack, just where Stepney had said it would be. Focused on remembering the bike lock’s combination: turn right to 4, back to 3, right again to 5. The lock clicked open.

  The blue canvas bag, with a change of clothes and accessories, was waiting for her behind the garbage bin. Following the fallback plan instructions, she crouched behind the bin. Her hands were shaking again. She stripped off the plain blue skirt and blouse she’d worn under the parachute suit and pulled on the floral cotton dress, buttoned the collar. She buckled on the ankle strap sandals, put on the straw hat. Stood slowly and looked around. No one.

  She searched the dress pockets and found her next destination written on a thin cigarette paper.

  Boulangerie chez 64 rue des Batignolles.

  She’d memorized the street map, hadn’t she? Why was she coming up blank?

  Think.

  Finally it came back. She put her bag in the bike basket, clutched the handlebars and started pedaling.

  Her heart was beating so fast she thought it would jump out of her chest.

  The warm morning felt oddly beautiful as she cycled down side streets, avoiding Pigalle. Linden blossoms in full heady bloom perfumed the air, taking her back to that summer in 1937—frequenting a Sorbonne café where Dafydd, the brooding, romantic Welshman, had caught her off guard with his smile. He’d been sketching the owner’s cat when he looked up and she got lost in his amber eyes. They’d talked for hours. She’d loved his laugh. The way he joked around with her, the awkward, big-boned American bumpkin.

  A coup de foudre, her concierge described it when she’d told her about meeting Dafydd. Love at first sight.

  And now she found herself back in a Paris that had changed completely. Dafydd was dead, her mission ruined. The sirens behind her were growing fainter, and suddenly she was bone-tired. Every part of her wanted to lie down on a bench and rest her legs, despite her instructions. Just for a minute—or maybe forever. No one would have to know; she’d leave the rifle in a dustbin. She would find her way back to . . . where? Home in Siskiyou County, where her father eked out a living as a migrant foreman on various cattle ranches? No ships were crossing the Atlantic. There was no place for her at her prissy mother-in-law’s Welsh home now, not without Dafydd and Lisbeth. She wondered if she’d even be welcome back in Orkney, a widowed non-British civilian who had recently faced court martial at a military facility. She had nowhere to go.

  She’d accepted a mission and failed.

  Right now, she should be thinking about nothing but reaching the destination written on the cigarette paper.

  As she cycled toward Batignolles, she was startled to notice she was passing horse-drawn carts, push barrows piled high with mattresses and household belongings, many old people and children. Parisians who had fled the city in fear a few weeks earlier were dribbling back in, returning to enemy occupation. Kate scanned the faces on the boulevard as her bicycle flew past. Defeat, anger and exhaustion were plain on their faces. A people licking their wounds.

  At the traffic roundabout, she spotted German signs where she remembered there having been flowers. A couple was embracing on the open platform at the back of a passing bus. Our Paris balcony, Dafydd had told her once when they had stood at the back of a bus just like that couple, watching the spreading view of the city below as the bus climbed up to Montmartre. Inside, the deep ache opened, her longing for Dafydd seizing her, blurring her vision.

  Jingling bicycle bells brought her back to the present.

  Pay attention.

  She took a side street and familiar scents assailed her: the tangy odor from a green metal pissoir, a whiff of a woman’s perfume, the acrid smoke of a hand-rolled cigarette. Rapid-fire Parisian argot spilled out of a shop, now bearing signs of future rationing regulations, and onto the sidewalk. The conversation was punctuated by the snort of an ice wagon horse, the clatter of the wagon’s wheels and the clip-clop of hooves on the cobbles, the flower seller’s shouts. The Paris she knew, if more subdued.

  “Achtung, mademoiselle!” Two Wehrmacht soldiers, white gloves tucked into their belts next to hanging daggers, stood in the crossing directly in her path. Her stomach lurched. She squeezed the handlebars, braked hard on the pedals. Her bike squealed to a halt inches away from the soldiers, the force throwing her straw market bag from the bike basket onto the street at the foot of the surprised Wehrmacht soldier.

  “Entschuldigen Sie, mademoiselle,” said the taller Wehrmacht soldier, picking up the strewn daisy bouquet, then Kate’s bag. The bag containing the disassembled rifle.

  His well-fed face grimaced at the weight. Panic filled her as she stared at the Luger clipped to his belt. Scenarios flashed through her mind. Should she grab the bag . . . and get shot? Act helpless, faint on the street and hope for sympathy from the enemy? Flirt and distract him?

  Her mind raced, searching for what to do, to say.

  All of a sudden, she was alone on the street with the soldiers. The passersby had melted away.

  This was it. She was dead.

  Sunday, June 23, 1940

  Montmartre, Paris | 9:45 a.m.

  “Sir, we’ve got the suspect at rue des Saussaies ready for your interrogation,” said the Wehrmacht soldier.

  “The melon seller?” Gunter Hoffman crouched at the Montmartre apartment’s open window, sweating in the sun. He eyed the shutter slats, imagining how the sniper had aligned the gun’s sight. It was the perfect vantage point. “Have you found a rifle in his barrow? Or in a trash bin, the bushes, or by the staircase?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  And they wouldn’t. He fingered the bullet that had been recovered from Sacré-Cœur’s limestone pillar. This had been a trained sniper, military grade, who wouldn’t make mistakes like that. Gunter had rechecked the apartment, empty except for the sheeted furniture, searching for a sense of the sniper, anything at all left behind.

  Nothing. A professional.

  He got down on his hands and knees by the window where the sniper had lain in wait to fire those two shots. He rubbed his fingers over the wooden floor. Stopped, feeling a faint damp spot, almost imperceptible and evaporating in the sunlight.

  A faint aroma lingered in the hot air.

  He sniffed his fingers, then stooped to sniff the floor. It wasn’t rifle oil—it wasn’t metallic or greasy. He licked his finger, searching for a taste. Water? The sniper’s perspiration from waiting in a closed hot apartment? What was the elusive scent?

  Just a nuance, then it was gone, lost in the pong of male sweat of the four officers turning the apartment over. En route he’d briefed these four on what to look for and questions he wanted answered.

  “Sir, we’ve assembled the churchgoers in the crypt,” said an arriving solider. As the Führer had ordered, the churchgoers had been kept locked in the church while SD and arriving troops searched the area. “They’re ready for questioning.”

  Gunter knew that would lead nowhere. “Danke. Take their statements and names and addresses, then let them go.” A formality.

  “We’re holding the building concierge downstairs. She’s already half-drunk and moaning about how her feet hurt and she needs to lie down.”

  “Did she see anyone go upstairs?”

  “She says the building is vacant except for an old woman and her grandchild on the third floor.”

  Gunter rose and pulled out his notebook. “I want to speak with both of them.”

  Just then a young lieutenant, dark eyed and tall, came into the apartment. “I’ve got an update from Munich for Gunter Hoffman.”

  Gunter waved. “Over here.” He took the report from the young lieutenant’s hand and scanned the pages. “Why wasn’t this report given to me earlier?”

 
“Control just received this, sir. I was told to find you right away.”

  Mein Gott. A British radio operator had been captured. Gunter knew successful clandestine operations depended on wireless communication. Was this radio man related to the parachute drops mentioned in the decoded British messages he’d seen in Munich? Or was the radio man linked to the shooter? Had the Führer been right, this was part of a British plot?

  His orders were to follow up.

  “You, sergeant.” Gunter pointed to the short-statured first soldier, the one who had been the most attentive during Gunter’s briefing en route. “Conduct the questioning of the concierge and the grandmother. Write down everything they say. Everything. Have your report ready in an hour.” He turned to the lieutenant. “You have a car?”

  “Waiting, sir.”

  Gunter set his fat attaché case beside him on the leather seat of the Mercedes on rue Lamarck. The smudged car windows were partially open to the humid air. Lilac branches flowered, spilling down the Sacré-Cœur hill. Picture perfect, like a postcard. A world away from war.

  Upset over the update he’d just received, he set his case loaded with reports on the seat and leaned forward as the car took off. “Lieutenant . . . ?”

  “Rolf Niels, sir,” said his driver, a young officer in a field gray-green uniform.

  “Lieutenant Niels, does this mean they’re already interrogating the British radio operator? Who ordered this?”

  “My instructions to pick you up came from Roschmann, at SD. That’s all I know.”

  Gottverdammt. There were already too many things going on he didn’t know about. How had that SD lout Roschmann gotten involved? Gunter couldn’t lose control. Jäger had made it clear this case was his; so had the Führer.

  What more could go wrong?

  Sunday, June 23, 1940

  Near Place de Clichy, Paris | 9:15 a.m.

  Kate held her breath, expecting to be shot on the spot. But the Wehrmacht soldier set Kate’s bag in her basket, doffing his cap.

  “Bonne journée, mademoiselle,” he said with a wide grin, gesturing for her to pass. “Allez-y.”

  Her fingers trembling on the handlebars, she gave him a thin smile and pedaled ahead, turning the corner and not looking back. She made herself take deep breaths.

  Clouded by emotion, she hadn’t stayed alert. She hadn’t been on the streets of Paris ten minutes and she’d almost run down a German soldier. She’d practically handed the rifle to the enemy, revealing herself as a foreign spy. She would have faced interrogation. Then the firing squad.

  Idiot.

  Sweat trickled down her back. She had papers, an identity card, but would they have held up? She’d gotten so lucky. That wouldn’t happen a second time; life didn’t work like that.

  Buck up, girl, her father would say.

  Concentrate.

  Stick to the plan. She pedaled by the Gaumont movie palace, now bearing a banner that read soldatenkino, and the soldiers lining up for an early movie. Continued toward le square de Batignolles down a cobbled side street, where a man fed rabbits in a hutch outside a café. Beyond that lay a street market. On the steps of Sainte-Marie de Batignolles, a black-robed priest was welcoming parishioners. She could have sworn he nodded to her. She set her bike against the wall by the bakery, went inside, waited in line and asked for Jean-Marie.

  “Jean-Marie’s at church,” said the curly haired woman clad in an apron. She gazed levelly at Kate. “Like always, mademoiselle.” The woman held out a receipt and coin. “You forgot your change this morning.”

  Kate palmed it without a glance at what she’d received. “Merci beaucoup, madame.” The meet was on; this handoff would indicate the next location to go to.

  Kate exited the bakery and walked her bike to a tree beside the church. Under the shady branches she pretended to be looking for something in her basket. There was a message written on the receipt. She stuck it in her pocket and walked the bike toward 59 rue Legendre, her destination, a few buildings over from the iron bridge that ran over the train tracks.

  As instructed, Kate left her bike at the doorway of the recessed porte cochère—the signal. Behind her lay a deserted concierge loge, mailboxes on the wall, a baby buggy covered with a film of dust standing to one side of a locked glass double door to the courtyard. She crouched in the deep doorway’s corner behind the bike, with a vantage of the street and nearby rail bridge. Her only way out would be to make a straight dash to the street then shimmy down the bridge’s metal struts and drop to the rail lines. A long way down.

  She struck a match and burned the cigarette paper and receipt, ground out the ash with her foot. Now she was to wait for instructions.

  Her stomach churned. She’d shot the wrong person, botched the assassination, escaped while soldiers arrested an innocent melon seller. Now she was still putting others at risk, all for a mission that had already gone sour.

  She tried to clear her mind by silently repeating her new instructions: Stay in place. Jean-Marie will be wearing a blue railroad cap.

  But she didn’t know her own escape route. What if Jean-Marie didn’t show up? What if by failing at her mission she’d gotten herself abandoned?

  She should fully disassemble the rifle to camouflage it better. But here? Risk ten minutes now but make it more likely she wouldn’t get caught later?

  The loose rifle screws and bolts were rolling around inside the basket. The barrel tip was making a hole.

  She was stuck here waiting. She had to keep her mind occupied instead of looping in fear. But if someone stumbled on her . . .

  She peered over the bike, saw no one and sat down. With the bike for cover, she removed her scarf with shaking hands, laid it out on the cracked mosaic tile and set the rifle pieces on top of it. She’d already removed the forestock from the buttstock. Now she got to work, rising to check the street every other minute. Finally, she’d screwed all the screws back on the rifle parts she’d removed in her hurry, then stowed the rifle pieces in the bottom of the bag after tying them together with her scarf. Now it was ready to reassemble, nothing loose or missing. Her gamble had paid off.

  Ten minutes turned to half an hour. Kate waited, peering out periodically to see the light glinting on the metal bridge railings spanning the tracks. She heard the rumbling of trains below, the long whistle signaling approach, the pealing of the Batignolles church bells. Families who hadn’t evacuated the city during the exodus were walking home from Mass on the narrow cobbled street, some with children, some couples arm in arm. In this residential pocket it seemed like a typical Parisian Sunday—on the surface, at least. But Kate’s nerves jangled.

  More than an hour passed. A young woman, swinging a basket, held a little boy’s hand. The boy was asking her to buy MarieLu biscuits s’il te plaît, Maman. On their way to the street market, Kate figured. Preparing for the midday meal. German occupation or not, the Sunday midday meal, when extended families gathered together, was religiously observed.

  Her shoulders ached. Hunger pangs and nausea warred in her stomach. As she waited obediently for her contact, she wondered if she should instead be climbing down from the pedestrian bridge to the railroad embankment to jump aboard a passing train.

  But this was a working-class neighborhood; there was nowhere she would blend in better on a sleepy Sunday. She suppressed her fears, her urge to run. She waited.

  Still no sign of her contact.

  Kate arranged her bag with the disassembled rifle behind her and sat back against the shadowed wall. She’d barely slept in thirty-six hours. First the bumpy midnight flight Friday, then parachuting into a barnyard full of cows—she’d missed Stepney’s contact who’d been supposed to take her to Paris. She’d stumbled through the dark countryside, her mission on the line, then somehow convinced a surprised dairy farmer to take her on his milk run. She’d lucked out and caught the early Saturday morning milk
train to Paris. Found the apartment Stepney had showed her on the map. She’d bought the flowers, reconnoitered the target spot at Sacré-Cœur, then hid out in the apartment all day and night, nervous and unable to sleep. Waiting.

  The heat emanating from the pavement, the insistent chug of train engines and the dull patter of footsteps on the cobbles lulled her to sleep.

  Her dreams were laced with sirens, the ground shuddering from the explosion, the flames, an inferno, the sucking heat, tripping over the scattered hot bricks, the flying sparks catching fire on her skirt, burning her knees.

  That wrenching in her chest, the pounding growing to a roar.

  She sat up with a cry, soaked in sweat. Always that nightmare. But the pounding hadn’t ceased now that she was awake. She heard the roar of engines, shouts. Flashes of khaki canvas-covered trucks passed—troops. The street rumbled.

  She wiped the stinging sweat from her eyes. Disoriented, the rifle tip sharp in her back, she struggled to stand. Had she missed her contact by falling asleep?

  Peering from the doorway, she saw a man with a blue railroad cap walking toward her on the opposite side of the street. With an unhurried pace he kept to the wall, smoking a cigarette, a magazine under his arm. At the doorway directly across he caught her gaze, then turned away and leaned against the doorway, taking a drag before flicking his cigarette into the gutter. He surveyed the street, looking up and down with maddening slowness.

  Her palms itched. She wanted him to hurry, to get this over with. But he just stood there, staring nonchalantly down the street. She’d been told he would introduce himself as Jean-Marie, but was he waiting for her to approach him so he’d know who she was? She was about to take a step toward him when a black car pulled up in front of him, blocking her view. A moment later two helmeted soldiers jumped out.