bitterly cold and her feet were frozen. She knew that later on, when she washed them in a bowl of warmed water back at the apartment, her toes would itch and burn as the chilblains that pierced them thawed out.
To take her mind off the cold, she ran through her instructions in her head once again, making sure she’d got them straight. Wait here until a man in a grey homburg with a green band goes into the shop. He will come out carrying a copy of Le Temps. Go into the shop and buy a copy of the newspaper, asking the tobacconist whether he has any of yesterday’s edition left over. He will hand you a folded copy from under the counter. Keep it safe in your bag. Walk to the Métro at the Gare d’Austerlitz and catch a train back to Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Sitting at a table in the back corner of the Café de Flore, you will see a man with sandy-coloured hair wearing a silk tie with a paisley pattern. Join him as if greeting a friend, and he will order you a coffee. Put the folded copy of the newspaper on the table while you drink your coffee. When you leave, do not pick it up.
This was not the first time she’d passed messages on for the network. Shortly after she’d returned to Paris, when she was dropping off some silk at the dyer’s to be matched as a lining for an evening dress, she’d spoken to a contact there whom she’d guessed might be involved in Resistance activities. Through him, she’d been introduced to a member of the network and had soon been given assignments like this one. She was aware that they were testing her at first, making sure she was who she said she was and that she was a reliable courier. She wasn’t even certain whether the messages she’d been passing on had been real so far. But today’s assignment was a little different from the usual, and she guessed that the proximity of the pick-up point to the Gare d’Austerlitz, which was one of the arrival points in Paris for trains from the east and the south as well as a point of departure for transports to the work camps, held an important significance. So she tried to ignore the cold, which seeped through the soles of her shoes, worn thin by the miles she’d walked in them, and pretended to study a bus timetable as, out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed the customer in the homburg hat entering the tabac.
A cloud of warmth, noise and cigarette smoke engulfed Mireille as she pushed open the door and stepped across the threshold of the Café de Flore. She picked her way around the pillars, making for the back corner of the room by the wood-panelled bar, as directed. At a banquette near the door, a group of soldiers in Nazi uniform laughed uproariously and one clicked his fingers in the air, summoning the waiter and ordering another bottle of wine. As Mireille passed, one of the soldiers leapt to his feet, blocking her passage. Her heart thumped against her ribs at the thought that he might demand to see what she was carrying in her bag and discover whatever message was concealed within the pages of the newspaper. But instead he made an elaborate bow and pretended to offer her his seat, to the raucous cheers of his comrades.
Suppressing her first instinct to spit in his face, and her second instinct to turn and run, Mireille managed to summon a polite smile and, with a diplomatic shake of her head, she stepped past the soldier and headed for the table in the back corner where a sandy-haired man wearing a paisley-patterned silk tie sat sipping a café-crème, reading his own copy of Le Temps.
The man set down his paper and rose to his feet as she approached, and they embraced as if they knew each other well. For a second, she breathed in the expensive scent of his cologne – a subtle blend of cedarwood and limes – and then she settled herself on the banquette opposite him.
A waiter appeared and the man ordered her a coffee while she casually pulled the folded newspaper out of her bag and laid it on top of the one on the table. The man ignored it completely, pushing both papers to one side so that he could lean towards her as a