away from the building, far enough out that she might see him but not enough to draw the suspicion of the guards posted by the front door. If she could see him, maybe then she would know he hadn’t abandoned her. That he was close enough should she need him.
He had taken another step, raising his hand, when the front door opened and out walked the little brown-haired maid. What was her name? Sophie? Sylvia? Kat turned back inside as the maid looked left and right and hurried to the next block with head down and arms crossed over her chest. She was his best bet of finding out what was going on inside that flat. Tilting his hat to block the side of his face from the guards, he shoved his hands in his pockets and followed the girl from across the street.
Three blocks down she stopped on the corner, glancing left and right as Eric’s car pulled up next to her. Leaning through the passenger window, she handed the driver a sealed envelope and raced back to the flat.
Chapter 17
“I hate this music.” Ellie swigged back another glass of champagne. “I hate this food, I hate that art, and I hate . . . this dress.” Lolling her head to the side, she plucked at the pale-pink pleats across her chest. “Makes me look like Aunt Mildred.”
Kat grabbed the crystal glass from Ellie’s hand before it spilled onto the marble floor. “We don’t have an Aunt Mildred.”
“Well, if we did, this is what she’d wear. Dusty old spinster. Can you believe he made me wear this?”
Maneuvering around to the back of a seven-foot-tall plaster replica of the Strasbourg Castle, Kat handed the glass to a white-jacketed waiter and waved him off as he offered yet another libation. “Yes. He’s controlling. Haven’t you figured that out by now, or do we need another week of solitary confinement?”
Ellie shook her head. “I can’t stand another second in there. Those walls are closing in on me.”
“Me too, so let’s try to behave and not spill our glasses all over the ambassador’s coattails.”
It was their first night out since their weeklong imprisonment. The previous evening a box had arrived with Ellie’s curtain-like dress with a note from Eric asking her to please wear it as she joined him in welcoming the party chancellery, Martin Bormann, and Goebbels to the National Museum of Architecture and Monuments. A postscript at the bottom stated that Kat was also invited as Ellie’s escort.
Scanning over the slicked-back heads of the Nazi officials crowding the floor, she spotted Eric standing next to a plaster collection of saints from Notre-Dame de Reims. Dressed in his most starched uniform, with medals gleaming, he preened like a peacock as he attempted to explain the importance of the masterful works surrounding them. Shining like a statue, his wife had poured herself into a gold-lamé halter-neck dress with the side seams nearly bursting from her added curves. Her dark eyebrows arched in challenge at Kat before sliding back to her prize, Eric.
Disgusted, Kat looked away. She was no escort. She was a referee to keep the mistress and wife from having a go right in front of Eric’s superiors and ruining his night. And what a night it was. All the top brass had assembled to oversee the unveiling of new plans for the museum. A place that had once held plaster recreations of French Medieval and Renaissance monument art, it was now destined to house German architectures. Wonder if they plan to tear down the frescos and erect an iron eagle?
She should make an effort to remember everyone’s names in case the information proved valuable to their London contacts.
“Oh, look. There’s Franz who does something that I can’t bother to remember.” Ellie pointed to a rounded fellow stuffing his face with cocktail shrimp. The buttons down the front of his tunic strained with the added morsels. “And look. He brought his mistress with no sign of a wife. She’s probably doing her duty back in Dusseldorf by raising their ten Aryan brats. See, these are the kinds of people Eric wishes me to make friends with. Old buzzards.”
Kat shot her a quelling look. “Keep your voice down. People are looking.”
“I don’t care.”
Kat yanked Ellie around to face the window before her outbursts brought over the black boots to march them before the Gestapo. Outside, patrol boats paddled down the Seine, flashing their lights along the banks in hopes of catching curfew breakers.