British snipers. You’re still going to the station.”
“You expect me to thank you?” said Lebel.
“Not at all.”
“What about the dog?”
Gunter wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “Return Didine to Madame Marie. Guten Tag.”
Sunday, June 23, 1940
Right Bank, Paris | Noon Paris Time
Kate’s anxiety mounted as she bicycled through the Place de l’Opéra. The outdoor tables at Café de la Paix were jammed, the crowd speckled with German uniforms. Women with elaborately curled hair smoked, drank and laughed with the enemy. Disgusted, Kate scanned the side street, noting camouflage-painted troop trucks parked by a former bank that bore a bold German banner proclaiming platzkommandantur. Cordons and troop trucks were set up on the wide boulevard. Striped wooden sentry houses manned by bayonet-rifle-bearing soldiers stood on the corners of Place de l’Opéra. She slowed as a trio of soldiers strode into the crossing, their rifles over their shoulders glinting in the sun.
A horn tooted and she took off past the arrow signs pointing to Lille, Metz, Brussels.
Stepney had underestimated the damned German efficiency—such a pervasive military presence in place after only two weeks of occupation. Like a plague of locusts, the victors mowed down and sampled everything in their path.
At least the Germans appeared on their best behavior. They looked like tourists with their cameras and maps. She wondered if somewhere they were carrying out reprisals for her botched mission.
Now she knew where she was. She needed to concentrate on meeting the contact. Pray that the café rendezvous hadn’t been compromised. What if the meeting proved impossible? That was her only connection to her escape route. Would she ever get out of Paris?
She’d worry about that later.
Concentrate.
First: How could she stow the rifle? The train station’s left luggage counters would be watched. Lockers in the public bath, she remembered, were scrutinized by bathhouse attendants.
She parked her bike near the Palais-Royal and wiped her brow with the back of her hand. Under the arcade ringing the garden, shaded by rows of leafy plane trees, a frizzy-haired old woman bent feeding stray cats. Kate spied a full garbage bin. Among the household items discarded during the exodus from Paris, she found a wicker picnic basket with a lid and dusted it off. Perfect for the rifle. She left the straw bag and fitted the wicker basket into the blue canvas bag that had held her change of clothes at the fabric market. It only just fit.
Back on her bicycle, Kate wove through traffic consisting of vélo-taxis, bikes, buses and the occasional Mercedes. The light breeze ruffled the black flags with red swastikas that stood at every block along rue de Rivoli. Notices in French and German were plastered on the walls. Her legs still ached but she was making up time.
She crossed the Pont Royal with her picnic basket. The green-gray of the Seine was the exact shade of the Wehrmacht’s feldgrau uniforms. Her skin crawled. The pain welled up fresh as she remembered how she, very much in love, had spent a summer afternoon strolling with Dafydd below on the quai. How Dafydd had uncorked a bottle of wine and they’d celebrated his selling a drawing.
A lifetime ago.
Ten minutes later she entered le Bon Marché, the chic department store at Sèvres-Babylone, for the second time in her life. She found the cloakroom in the same place where it had been when she’d come here to shop for a birthday present for Dafydd three years earlier. She smiled at the attendant, a bored young woman, who gave her a blue claim check for her wicker basket.
Sunday, June 23, 1940
The Kommandantur, Place de l’Opéra, Paris
12:30 p.m. Paris Time
After rounding up the two other parachutists, Gunter herded them all into a troop truck from le Bourget and had them transported to Paris for questioning. He’d let them stew in holding cells. The murdered radio man’s last words rolled in his mind. Something told him the woman at the rendezvous at Café Littéraire would be the missing piece to this puzzle. Was she the assassin targeting the Führer?
But the Sorbonne would have to wait—a radioed message relayed to him at le Bourget had ordered him to the Kommandantur. Niels gunned