Three Hours in Paris

by Cara Black

“My contact’s sitting on the third bench from the Medici Fountain in Jardin du Luxembourg. He’s reading. You’ll ask, ‘What book are you reading?’ He’ll answer, ‘Plutarch’s Lives.’”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “He supports the Reich. Can I have my ID back?”

  Her spirit had returned.

  “Answer me, Jeanne.”

  “I said you’ll pay him. Then he agreed.”

  As a policeman in Munich he’d had varying results with paid informants.

  The coffees arrived. Gunter paid. He slipped two more hundred-franc notes under Jeanne’s saucer.

  “I need your eyes, Jeanne. You’re going shopping at le Bon Marché.”

  “Like that’s enough for anything in that department store?”

  “You’re going to watch for a woman who picks up a wicker basket from the cloakroom.”

  He didn’t know if she’d return to pick up the rifle. But sniper rifles were precious—someone would. That was all he had to go on right now.

  He put the Café Littéraire matchbox in her hand.

  “Will I get my ID back then?”

  “Follow whoever picks up the basket and call this number. If you lose her, call that number immediately. Then I’ll return your identity card.”

  She’d cooperate. No one got ration coupons without an ID.

  “Je dois y aller. That fancy Bon Marché closes soon.”

  “Then you better drink up.” He stood up and signaled Niels.

  Sunday, June 23, 1940

  Map Room, Tactical Center under King Charles Street, London

  2:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time

  Stepney passed the Map Room, its raftered ceiling braced for bombardment, its walls covered with maps and colored stickpins. Two mice in signature drab Wren uniforms scurried past him, arms laden with files. The PM, puffing on his cigar, spent hours here in the middle of the night, studying those little pins, rearranging notepapers vertically and diagonally over the Continent indicating troop emplacement and Atlantic convoy routes.

  At the moment, though, Stepney’s only concern was his summons to the Cabinet War Room. He was late.

  As he made his way down the narrow corridors, his mind turned over the problem of Nigel Swanson. He passed rooms where stenographers in cubicles transcribed notes and typists pounded on their soundless typewriters—the PM couldn’t stomach the clacking keys. Stepney gauged the quiet tension and single-mindedness of each component: here the war was planned, plotted and strategized. From outward appearances, it was a well-oiled operational headquarters. Stepney knew better.

  Just as Napoleon had, Hitler stood just across the Channel, only a body of water between England and the Reich-dominated Continent.

  In the Cabinet War Room two men waited. Cathcart, with his thick brows, sat by his SIS lackey, who gave a nervous tug on his Etonian tie. And to think these types, who’d never seen combat, conducted a war. On the table sat a Secraphone, the scrambler telephone with a green Bakelite handset and black body.

  Cathcart indicated a leather chair.

  Stepney almost declined, his damned arthritis was so inflamed from sitting too long. Cathcart knew bugger all. If Stepney kept score he’d mark one up on the old-boy public school network.

  “What’s your progress on that buoy, Stepney? Any idea what Admiral Lindau was planning?”

  Stepney caught Cathcart’s verb tense. “Was? You mean Admiral Lindau’s been reassigned?”

  “Permanently reassigned, according to chatter we intercepted from Berlin. Lindau suffered a heart attack while visiting Paris’s Sacré-Cœur with his beloved Führer. The Paris visit was cut short after three hours.”

  Stepney controlled his surprise. Could it be the Yank had actually . . . No, it was extremely unlikely. He brushed that thought aside. At last report his parachuted sniper team had landed on schedule. But no, they wouldn’t have jeopardized their own mission—taking out Stossel, Lammers, and von Duering—with a different high-profile attack.

  “What exactly do we know?”

  “By zero nine hundred hours, air traffic monitors believe, Lindau’s body was aboard a plane following the Führer’s Focke-Wulf.” Cathcart thrust a telex at him. “This just came in from Bletchley. As soon as we received it we called you here.”

  And here he’d been stuck in a meeting.

  “We have other, even more pressing issues, Stepney,” Cathcart said. “We need you to contact an operative named Nigel Swanson.”

  “Already working on it, Cathcart,” said Stepney.

  Sunday, June 23, 1940

  Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris | 3:15 p.m. Paris Time

  Gunter crossed his legs, fanning himself in the hovering heat. Laughter and splashing drifted through the Jardin du Luxembourg as children pushed small colored boats with sticks in the round pond. Gunter’s daughter, Anna, would love this place.

  Right now she was most delighted by soft cuddly things. How he wished that Steiff teddy bear wasn’t sitting in his temporary office.

  Next to him on the bench sat a matron, next to her a young man with rolled-up shirtsleeves reading a book. Finally the matron spotted a friend, waved and left, and the young man laid the book on his lap. A book in Latin, Gunter noticed.

  Gunter felt the perspiration on his neck. The chills.

  “What book are you reading?” he asked in broken French.

  “Plutarch’s Lives.”

  Gunter nodded.

  “What did you want to talk with me about?” the young man asked him in Hochdeutsch, formal High German. Gunter figured him for an academic.

  He shuffled the artist’s sketch across on the bench to him. Then casually left his hand on the bench. “This woman.”

  “Her?”

  From the way he said this, it sounded like he knew her.

  “Who is she and where?”

  “I deal through my connections with people I trust,” said the young man.

  “Gut. Now you’re dealing with me. Lift up the sketch.”

  A pile of German marks.

  “I don’t like to disrupt my connections.”

  Of course not. Gunter glanced at his watch. “So you leave me no choice but to bring you in for questioning.”

  “I’m protected by someone at the Kommandantur.”

  “Tell me the Kommandant’s name.”

  “Kommandant Kostoff, military head of Paris.”

  “I’ll give the Kommandant your regards when I see him today.” Dappled leaf shadows patterned his shoes. “But now you’re working with me. See him.” Gunter pointed to Niels walking by, as prearranged, crunching gravel. “He’s not as polite as I am.”

  The young man’s eyes darted. In his moment of distraction, Gunter slid his hand into the jacket that was folded on the bench.

  “Think of us as added protection. The highest.”

  The young man nodded. Put the sketch and bills in his canvas bag.

  “Cowgirl. A code name.”

  Gunter stretched and shifted closer. “Where’s she hiding?”

  “Not sure.”

  “You can do better than that.”

  The young Frenchman took an empty cigarette packet from his pants pocket. Turned and wrote something inside it. “My best guess.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “No one in the group will talk. But there’s a meeting tonight at this place.”

  “Why would she go there?”

  “Contacts, to try to find a way to escape . . . I don’t know.” He took a sunglass clip-on and clipped it over his glasses. “Look, my mother’s German; she raised me properly.”

  All this Hochdeutsch and academic posturing made Gunter wonder if he was just a poser climbing up the ladder.

  “It’s important in my family to be loyal to the Reich. I’ve managed to infi
ltrate an underground group, but these days everyone’s suspicious of everyone. I have to keep my cover with them. You’ll need to arrest me at the meeting, too.”

  With pleasure, Gunter thought. “I want her.”

  The young man reached for his corduroy jacket on the bench, about to stand. “Understood. I heard she’s been informed of the meeting. She’ll show.”

  “Gut. Because if you want this back later.” Gunter flashed the wallet that he’d lifted from the young man’s jacket pocket. He scanned the contents, then slid it into his own jacket pocket. “You better be right, Monsieur Verdou.”

  Part III

  Sunday, June 23, 1940 | 4:00 p.m.

  Sunday, June 23, 1940

  Place Pigalle, Paris | 4:00 p.m. Paris Time

  As Kate walked the peach frock rustled over her champagne silk chemise. Her new look, styled by Gilberte, earned her glances from the café terrace at Place Pigalle. Her hair was swept back in a crocheted snood topped with a bow like Ginger Rogers, and she wore round sunglasses and red lipstick. She almost felt French—the Guerlain Gilberte had dabbed behind her ears helped.

  Believe. As long as she didn’t open her mouth, she’d pass.

  Blend in, don’t stand out, Stepney had told her.

  In the red-light district of Pigalle, she fit right in.

  Alert, she walked into le Mouton and approached the zinc counter. On the walls were framed photos of prizefighters and a map of Corsica.

  “What can I get you, mademoiselle?” asked the barman, thick black hair oiled back and gold crucifix around his neck.

  Gilberte had told her most in the nightlife milieu were part of the Guerini brothers’ gang, that the Corsican gangs from Marseilles infested Pigalle.

  Keep it simple.

  She smiled. “Dédé.”

  The barman eyed her. His gaze rested on her hips. “Who’s asking?”

  “Gilberte sent me.”

  The barman slapped a card on the counter: Club le Select.

  Hadn’t Gilbette said she was supposed to wait fifteen minutes?

  “But I thought . . .”

  “Plans change.”

  She felt a knot form in her stomach. Had something gone wrong already? Keep moving, something told her. “Merci.”

  Club le Select turned out to be two doors down, and Dédé in the cellar.

  “This better be good.” Dédé, a short squat man, was heaving beer barrels down the steps into the dim cellar. Curly chest hair peeked from under his sweat-stained undershirt. “Got something for me?”

  She showed him Gilberte’s pistol. Leaned close enough to whisper in his ear. “I need radio contact with London. Consider this a trade.”

  He sucked in his breath. “That’s hard. Takes time.”

  “Dédé,” someone called. “Hurry up.”

  “No guns here. Take it with you.”

  “Gilberte said you knew a place to stay.”

  He shrugged. “The cheese shop on rue des Martyrs. Tell Lily I sent you.”

  “Look, I need to get a message to London.”

  “Someone might know how, I’ll ask around. Now leave.” He gestured her up the beer-reeking stone steps and out the open back door.

  “Why would Dédé send you here?”

  Lily, if that was her real name, shook her head. In the closed cheese shop she leaned over the counter under a map of France with all its cheeses by region. A cheese for each day of the year, Dafydd would have said, and more.

  “I’ve got kids. My parents. A sergeant’s billeted on the top floor. You can’t stay here.”

  Dejected, Kate didn’t feel any sense of surprise—it was too dangerous for her to stay in Paris, dangerous to anyone who helped her. Through the window she saw a soldier in a feldgrau uniform walk by, then knock on the door.

  “He lives upstairs,” said Lily. “Go.” She shoved a wedge of Gruyère into Kate’s hand and saw her to the door.

  “Merci, madame,” said Kate, controlling her nerves as she ducked past the sergeant standing in the door.

  A close call, but what now? A sense of foreboding filled her. She had begun to wonder about Stepney’s mission, how it possibly could have gone well, where she would have ended up if it had worked out. If she was nothing but bait for a bigger fish.

  Breathe.

  Every moment she risked exposure. But she paused at the cheese shop window to study the map.

  Improvise, Stepney had said, think on your feet.

  Why not take a train down south? From there work her way to the Pyrénées and cross to Spain? She’d do better in the wilderness, hiking through the mountains, than here, where any word she spoke could get her killed.

  Kate waited in the hot, crowded ticket line in Gare Saint-Lazare, the nearest train station. She waited with women and children who sat on their suitcases, old men fanning themselves in the heat. She still had many people in front of her when the ticket window was shut. Sold out.

  What now?

  She followed the others as they ran to another window. A local train—it would take hours. As the crowd parted she noticed German soldiers and French police at the platform entrances checking passengers’ papers. They were picking out women to question.

  A shudder ran through her. She couldn’t count on her papers holding up. Jean-Marie could have given her away under torture.

  Forget the train. She shouldered her bag, got in step with the disembarking passengers and headed for the station exit.

  The only option was to press Dédé for another hiding place.

  In the steep and otherwise deserted cobbled alley behind Club le Select’s cellar, Dédé was still rolling beer barrels from a cart. The cart was hitched to a thick-legged draft horse, a dappled chocolate and white reminding her of Rosie, the mare she’d hitched up for crop furrowing on the ranch outside Klamath Falls.

  Her eye caught the horse’s sweating flanks, which were encrusted with matted hair and an oozing sore. A crying shame to treat a horse that way, and no water or feed in sight. Pa always said the disposition of an owner could be told in the way he treated his stock.

  Dédé had disappeared. She’d chew him out when he returned.

  Wild yellow roses trailed up the lichen-scabbed wall, perfuming a woody sweetness over the sour odor of beer. Kate filled an empty bucket with water at the nearby green metal faucet that serviced the alley. The horse neighed as she offered it to him. He was afraid.

  She knew the feeling.

  “Good boy,” she murmured, “good boy,” patting his damp flank. He snorted, his nostrils flaring. Kate kept stroking him until he calmed down. “That’s right, boy.” She grabbed a rag, rubbed down his damp flanks, then stroked his neck as he lapped up the water.

  She liked Dédé less and less.

  In the alley’s nearby lean-to shed, she found a feed bag. As she was lifting it, she heard groaning.

  Startled, she dropped the bag, spilling feed. A man, white faced, huddled under burlap sacks. She gasped as he grabbed her ankle in a viselike grip.

  “Aidez-moi,” he rasped. “S’il vous plaît, you’ve got to get me to . . . bloody hell.” His thick British accent was tinged in pain.

  A stranded British soldier?

  “First let go of my ankle,” she said.

  He did.

  “You . . . a Yank?”

  “Got it in one. Who are you?”

  “Can you . . . help me to . . . ?”

  Concerned, she knelt down by the burlap sacks. Saw his sweating brow in the dim light. “Help you do what?”

  The man’s eyes creased in pain.

  “You’re hurt. What happened?”

  He shook his head. Spittle trailed from the edge of his mouth. Flushed cheeks. She felt his brow. He was burning up.

  Like Lisbeth.

  “ . . . the plans .
. . invasion . . .”

  She heard footsteps coming from the beer cellar across the alley, whispering from the shed’s door.

  “. . . have to tell Gilberte.”

  She peered outside to see the Corsican barman running across the alley. Then Dédé grabbed her wrists. Caught off guard she stumbled against the flimsy wood. A big mistake.

  “What are you doing in here?” Dédé had kicked the shed door closed and pushed her against the wall.

  “It’s a crime to work a thirsty horse like this, Dédé.” Light filtered through the cracks over the blood-smeared hay.

  “That’s none of your business. There’s Boches everywhere. You need to get out of here.”

  He let go of her wrists. The man lying on the ground let out a long moan.

  “This man needs a doctor.”

  “Not here,” Dédé said. “He needs to leave. Since you know horses, you drive this Englishman where he’s going on the cart.”

  “Changed your mind awful quick. Who is he?”

  “All I know, he’s got something. He’s important.”

  “He said something about the invasion . . .”

  “Then you know more than me.”

  An idea was forming. She’d failed her mission, but if she helped this wounded man, maybe Dédé’s network would help her. If he was so important, maybe he would be able to help her make radio contact . . . or even escape. “Okay, but I need your help.”

  “Tant pis. The Boches will be here any minute for beer.”

  “Didn’t you have a plan to hide this man? Somewhere for him to go?”

  “I know someone,” Dedé said. “You take him to the address I give you. We’re all dead if the Germans find him.”

  Her insides twisted. But she nodded.

  She couldn’t go out driving a horse cart dressed like this. While Dédé backed up the cart, she wiped off her lipstick and rooted around the shed for something to put over her dress. Among the feed sacks, bushels of hay and empty barrels, she found a bleu de travail and a cap. The work coat was none too clean but it would do for now.

  The man moaned. With the burlap covering him, she couldn’t see his injury, but blood streaked the dirty straw on the floor.