Across the bar, she noticed a man younger than herself with close-set eyes, wearing a gray wool blazer. He was pretending to read a Le Monde. “Procès Pour Crimes de Guerre!” the headline read. “War Crimes Trial.” But Eleanor could feel the man watching her over the top of the page. Her muscles tensed. Knowing when one was being tailed was something they taught the agents at Arisaig House from the start, but this was the first time that Eleanor had to worry about it herself.
Eleanor quickly finished her drink and signed her tab, then started across the lobby to the elevator. She stepped inside her room, a once-elegant space that now suffered from a sagging bed and peeling wallpaper.
There was a knock at the door. Eleanor jumped, then looked through the peephole. The man from the bar. Rather overt for one who was tailing her, Eleanor thought. For a moment, she considered not answering. But the man had clearly seen her come upstairs, and he might have information she was looking for. She opened the door a crack. “Yes?”
“I’m Henri Duquet. I was with the French resistance.” Once speaking such words aloud would have been a death sentence; now he wore it like a badge of honor.
She hesitated, still uncertain how he had found her or what he wanted. “I’m Eleanor Trigg,” she offered cautiously, opening the door wider.
He stepped inside, setting down the newspaper he had been reading at the bar. He eyed her coolly. “I saw you over at the ministry where I work. You’ve been asking questions all over Paris. People are not happy about it.”
“Which people?” He did not answer. “Did you know the agents of the Vesper circuit during the war?” she asked. “Vesper? Renee Demare?” She used the girl’s code name as a reflex, then remembered it didn’t matter anymore. “I mean, Marie Roux? Do you know what happened to them?” It could be a bluff. She tried not to get too excited. “If it is a question of money...” she began, calculating how much she could give him from her own funds and still have enough for the trip home.
“Non!” he said fiercely, and she worried that she had offended him. Suddenly, the man grabbed her arm. Looking into his seething eyes, she knew he was angry. “Come,” he said. “I want to show you the blood that is on your hands.”
* * *
Forty minutes later Eleanor found herself standing in the middle of Gestapo headquarters in Paris.
“Blood on my hands?” Eleanor had repeated questioningly as Henri Duquet had led her from the hotel. “I have no idea what you are talking about.” Eleanor felt guilty, to be sure, that she had not acted sooner on the radio transmissions and forced the Director to listen. But this Frenchman could not possibly know that.
As he had led her toward an awaiting Renault, she had tensed. Never let an assailant take you from the primary scene of encounter; it was a cardinal rule of espionage. Once you were removed from your familiar territory, you were vulnerable and weak. She had no business going God knows where with this stranger who so clearly despised her.
“Where are you taking me?” she demanded. He didn’t answer. She thought about resisting, even making a scene to stop him. But he might have information about her girls.
Henri did not speak as he drove through the streets of Paris at dusk. Eleanor hadn’t really paid much attention to the city as she had rushed from one government building to another during her first few days of inquiries. Now she studied the scene outside the window, partly to calm her nerves and partly to make careful note of their route in case she had to find her way back in a hurry. The streets were brisk; fashionably clad couples chatted behind the wide café windows, shopkeepers drew down the awnings for the night. But there was a kind of haze from the war that seemed to linger over it all, muting the once-gay colors.
Finally, the car turned onto a wide residential street. Avenue Foch, a sign at the corner read. Eleanor knew immediately where they were going. Her stomach tensed. She had read about No. 84 Avenue Foch in the intelligence reports during the war. It had been the Paris headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst, the German counterintelligence agency.
Easy, she thought, willing herself to breathe as the car came to a halt before a five-story town house with wrought