Victoria—Veronique Colbert—was the first to arrive at the meeting place. It was Saturday, October 3. La Petite Madeleine was a narrow little book-and-tea establishment tucked away on a back street in the quiet and sleepy charm of Montparnasse, a residential district adjoining the Latin Quarter. Less prosperous than others of its kind located closer to the renowned tourist attractions of the Montparnasse Cemetery and the Paris Catacombs, the shop was not often visited by guidebook-carrying German soldiers. Equally unenticing were the shop’s watery tea and dry madeleines that food shortages had forced La Petite Madeleine to serve in lieu of its once delicious tisane tea, buttery pastries, and rich boursin sandwiches. The back room of an establishment of no distinction with instant egress to a maze of alleys and winding streets was an ideal meeting place for a group not wishing to be seen congregating around a café table in their own neighborhood.
The book section of the shop was located at the entrance. Patrons passed through it to reach the tearoom. Victoria had dressed with careful downplay of any detail about her person that might invite notice. In the six days she’d been in Paris, she had already attracted too much attention, a desired effect in L’Ecole d’Escrime Français, the most celebrated fencing academy in France. As calculated, from the first day of her employment as an instructor of foil, the young German military officers enrolled as students had swarmed about her, and now the docket under Mademoiselle Veronique Colbert was filled.
But here, and on the street, it was wise to be invisible, so today she wore a prewar trench coat over a dowdy dress, down-at-the-heels oxfords, and a scarf that concealed the severe bun at the nape of her neck, in contrast to the French chignon that had drawn admiring gazes from her jackbooted students. A pair of thin, wire-framed sunglasses sat on her nose, and she carried a market basket with a week’s ration of bread and cheese. Here was a woman no more remarkable than a weary housewife of the lower classes stepping into the shop for a cup of tea after a day of waiting in grocery lines with the hope food was still left to buy when she reached the head of the queue.
“Tea,” she said in French to the aproned man wiping the counter to indicate that she was not here for reading material. The shop smelled dankly of old books and spent tea leaves.
“One?” he asked.
Victoria shook her head. “Five. I’m meeting friends.”
The man slung his polishing towel over his shoulder, eyes lighting up at the prospect of customers. “Very good, madame. Follow me,” he said.
Employee or proprietor? Victoria wondered. Proprietor, she thought. He led with the right-of-way of ownership. Was he working with the SOE or OSS? Would the major have chosen this spot if it wasn’t a safe location? Had the proprietor been expecting her and the rest of the team? Was he one of them?
Only one table was occupied at this, the tea hour, in Paris. A lone customer, a Frenchman by the looks of him, sat reading in a corner by the light of the October afternoon that filtered through a dirty window. As trained, Victoria memorized his features in case she should see him again. Thick in the neck, broad in the shoulder, florid-faced, he wore the traditional black beret, turtleneck, black leather jacket, and inevitable scarf of his countrymen. A Gauloises cigarette drooped from his lips. Absorbed in his book, he did not glance up at her entrance. The proprietor paid him no more mind than if he’d been the shop’s house cat curled up in a corner, and Victoria guessed him to be a regular at his usual table. Okay, then.
She removed her sunglasses to better make out her surroundings in the gloom and said, “Over there, s’il vous plaît,” pointing to the table farthest away. The team would push two tables together to make room for five. The proprietor drew out a chair facing sideways to the Frenchman and asked in a courtly manner if madame wished him to take her coat.
She answered, “Non, merci.”
“You will wait to order?”
“Oui. My friends will be here shortly.”
“May I bring you something while you wait, madame?”
“Non, merci.”
“You have only to ask,” the man said, giving the table a vigorous swipe with the towel before he bowed away.
Victoria sensed the Frenchman glance over at them, as if he, too, were surprised by all the bowing and scraping in an establishment where ceremony was not expected. She rejected her impulse to pull her scarf forward to obscure her profile, in case the gesture seemed furtive. In this city, it paid to be extremely careful of one’s smallest movements and to suspect every stranger a potential enemy. The Frenchman went back to his book, and Victoria set the basket on the floor and her purse in her lap—she had already marked the exit door—and laced her hands together on the edge of the table to wait, a frump of a woman, bowed down with the weight of misery wrought by the German occupation.
Actually, she did feel bowed from the weight of misery. For all she knew, Labrador might have already been arrested by the Gestapo. If her teammates did not show today, she would know that their radio operator had been made to talk and the others picked up at the dead-letter box within their first days in Paris. Victoria had escaped only because of a chance glance down an alley near the drop’s location. The team had been instructed to go to the mailbox as soon as possible to alert Labrador of their successful insertions. Dressed as she was today, she’d been on her way to the house next to the convent wall when she spotted a black Mercedes 260D sedan parked facing the street from a narrow alley. The car was the preferred choice of the Gestapo and SS—the “death mobile,” Parisians called it. Seeing such a car on the street struck terror into hearts. It meant serious trouble for some poor soul, and this one looked ready to pounce.
Panicked, she’d wondered if it was waiting to pounce on her. She’d hurried away from the street like a woman late for work, her coded note to Labrador tucked deep into her coat pocket. The Mercedes windows had been too dark to see whether the car was occupied, but she’d expected to hear it roar into life any minute and tear after her. She had torn up the note and strewn the pieces in the litter on the street, and not dared return to the drop.
Once out of danger and her panic under control, Victoria took stock. If Labrador had been taken, the major would learn of it and alert her through her facilitator, Jacques Vogel, fencing master of the school. Labrador could give up no information about her working name, her address, or place of employment, thanks to the shrewd design of Major Renault. So for the moment, she was safe. She would not abort her mission and give up her only chance to find Ralph, not until word came that Labrador had been compromised.
The rest of the week, while waiting to hear from the major, Victoria had gone about her assignment as planned, gathering fragments and pieces of intel dropped carelessly by students without giving a thought to the possibility that their foil instructor could understand every word of German they spoke. As of this morning, when she had still heard no bad news from Jacques Vogel, she’d felt justified in risking an appearance in the tea shop this afternoon. She’d chance it that she’d have time to slip out the exit door before the Gestapo crashed into the tearoom.
The surface of the table felt gummy with the film of a half century of use despite the proprietor’s earnest arm grease, and she would have removed her hands at first touch, but that, too, might attract attention from the man by the window. What did a Frenchwoman of her station have to be so persnickety about in the sort of shop she was accustomed to patronizing, especially in these times of rationed soap?
She knew that informers were everywhere, their treachery fueled by desperation for food, medicine, travel permits, the release of a loved one from prison, or simply out of petty jealousy or a personal desire for revenge. No place and no one was safe. The most innocent actions could be reported as suspicious to the Gestapo and French police. A resident on her street was taken in for questioning because a neighbor had reported that each morning she rearranged the pots of herbs on her windowsill, a code used by the Resistance. For the same reason, a Catholic priest in the neighborhood had been arrested on the notion that his homilies conveyed clandestine messages. The butcher’s son had been denounced for allegedly relaying information of German activity in meat wrappings, and the corner newsstand operator was not seen again after being taken off on the false charge of distributing underground newspapers. Such was the atmosphere in Nazi-occupied Paris.
Victoria took a deep breath and relaxed. There was time yet. She’d arrived ten minutes early, even after taking the roundabout route to make sure she wasn’t followed. One of her students, a young lieutenant in the Wehrmacht and a novice to foil but confident of its mastery, had taken a pesky shine to her. Victoria suspected he was nothing more than a file clerk in the organization, but he had access to information that he spilled willy-nilly, trying to impress her. She’d refused his offers to escort her home, but he wasn’t one to take no for an answer, and she half expected to find him waiting outside the school at the end of her workdays, a serious concern on days like today.
Minutes passed. Three…five…seven…nine. Victoria checked the lining of her coat to make sure of her L pill, and her purse for her pencil explosive. Apprehension swelled in her chest, dried her throat. Her friends were not coming. They were lost. Every horror that she’d imagined had come to pass. She glanced at the exit door and was about to pick up her market basket when her peripheral vision caught the Frenchman lift his gaze from his book. Chatter in the bookshop penetrated her plugged hearing, voices growing familiar as they came closer. Were her ears deceiving her? The door to the tea shop opened and the proprietor entered, the smile of Limpet beaming over his head. Following him were Lodestar and Lapwing, but where was Labrador? Where was their little pixie?
Then Labrador’s blond head poked out from behind the wide shoulders of Lapwing. “Bonjour, notre ami,” she said smiling.
Victoria rose from the table, her fencer’s legs trembling. “Bonjour, mes chers amis,” she whispered, her voice lost in a flood of relief.
The proprietor swept a hand toward them. “Your friends, madame?” he asked with a flourish.
“Yes, indeed they are. Merci, monsieur,” Victoria said.
The Frenchman snuffed out his Gauloises and stood, tucking the unsmoked half of the cigarette into his pocket and his book under his arm, presumably because the newcomers had interrupted his reading or perhaps to allow old friends their privacy. So engaged were the young people in their enthusiastic greetings that they did not notice him watching them with heightened interest as he passed out of the room.