It had been a long wait for Bridgette to learn if the team was still in operation. She’d not found a scrap of intel on the floor beneath the mail slot all week. She had begun to worry they’d been rolled up, and on the fifth day radioed the major to ask if she should close up shop. He’d last heard of them from their contacts who had confirmed that they had landed safely, but not a word since.
“Remain until the date of the meeting at the café,” he’d said. “You’re to keep the appointment, but if you see a red flag in the window, get the hell out of there and head for your safe house immediately. Copy that?”
She copied. The stone wall, freshly cleaned and primed, still waiting for the first stroke of her brush, glowed in the afternoon sunlight when she set off for the meeting, an eye out for surveillance, but her nerves were so tightly strung after a week of worry that she could imagine shadows waltzing with lampposts. She was sure the major was as nerve-racked as she. It was no wonder then that when she approached the café—no red flag in the window—she thought she was hallucinating when she saw Limpet and Lapwing and Lodestar jump out smiling from behind a bell tower across the street, where they’d obviously been hiding. “Well, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” Chris said, sweeping her into a crushing hug. “We thought you’d been arrested!”
After each had had a turn at hugging her, Bridgette said with the annoyance of a mother overjoyed to be reunited with her lost chicks but angry enough to give them a good swat for wandering off, “What? Really? Well I thought the same of you!” She swiped the tears of relief from her eyes and said, “I thought you’d all been rounded up when I didn’t hear a peep from any of you. The major and I have been worried sick. You were supposed to let me know when you were in place.”
“I’m sorry, Labrador,” Brad said, “but we couldn’t contact you because the drop box has been compromised.”
“So we stayed out of sight until you turned up,” Bucky explained.
Bridgette stared at them. “You all think the drop box is compromised? Why?”
“We’ll tell you in the café,” Chris said. “Have you heard from Liverwort?”
“Not a word.”
But there she was when they walked in, looking like a hausfrau on washing day, plain as a scrub board, but she didn’t fool them. They would have recognized that profile anywhere. She stared at them as if they were genies materializing out of the room’s smoke, and Bridgette recognized that Liverwort, too, had spent the week thinking they’d all been blown.
After exuberant greetings, they pulled out chairs, drew close, and Victoria, speaking in a low tone that did not carry beyond the tearoom, recounted her story first. “I saw a Mercedes, a Gestapo car, parked in an alley up the street from the house with the mail slot the day I went to report to you. The car was pointed forward as if lying in wait to snag somebody, so I kept on walking. The next day, I circled back behind the passageway and found the same car parked there and the day afterward. I could only conclude that you’d been arrested, Labrador, and…well, you know…so I stayed away.”
Bucky said, “I saw the car you described the day I went to report in, too, and made the same deduction.”
Chris said, “And that goes for me, too.”
“That makes four of us,” Brad said to Bridgette. “I spotted the car of the same type and assumed you’d been taken.”
Bridgette looked around at the drawn faces showing the strain of their worry and anxiety of the last week. Her own stomach muscles had yet to relax. But rather than head off to their safe houses, they had stuck it out and taken the risk to attend this meeting to see if she’d made it. Amazing. But her fear and anxiety, mixed with a surge of affection for the team, was now also flooded with relief. Bridgette knew the car that had spooked them and what it was doing in the alley, but only after the fact, and what could she have done about it if she’d known earlier?
“You don’t have to worry about the Mercedes, guys,” she said. “It wasn’t parked there because of you. It belongs to the Gestapo lover of a prostitute who lived in the building by the alley. She’s since been arrested on charges of being a spy and the car is no longer there.”
“How in the world do you know that?” Victoria asked.
“I have my sources,” Bridgette replied archly. In fact, the plight of the poor prostitute had been discussed at the supper table at the convent. Sister Mary Frances, mother superior of the Sisters of Charity convent, got the news from the concierge of the apartment complex where the prostitute lived. Bridgette had not connected the dots between the Mercedes and the bare floor under the mail slot. All along, for the team’s safety, she had not been comfortable with the major’s decision to assign Dragonfly a mutual drop box. Last week’s situation called for revisiting the issue. She sat forward and folded her hands on the table. “For your own peace of mind, and mine, maybe it’s time we question the wisdom of a central location for a drop. All our angst this week could have been avoided if you each had your own dead-letter box,” she said.
She stopped talking as tea was brought in. Just as well, Bridgette thought. The lull would give them time to think about an alternative to the mail slot, but when the proprietor had gone, Chris spoke up. “Speaking for myself, I see the logic of a single collection point. As the major pointed out, Labrador, I don’t see how you could possibly do the footwork your job would require.”
“I could manage it,” Bridgette said.
“Really?” Victoria challenged, eyebrow perked. “How?”
“Well, I thought I’d look for places within close proximity to one another near the metro stop where we get on and off the train each day…”
“The Saint-Michel station and surrounding areas are heavily guarded, crawling with Gestapo and SS and guard dogs,” Bucky interrupted. “The shops and apartments have eyes, and informers on the lookout for escaping Jews are thick around every lamppost. How long do you think you’d stay safe in an environment like that?”
Before Bridgette could reply, Brad butted in. “I agree. Somebody is bound to notice you visiting our hiding places each day, Labrador, even if we’re lucky to escape going undetected. Your comings and goings would establish a pattern.”
Victoria said flatly, “The drop box we have now is ideal. I see no need to change it.”
“I don’t, either,” Chris said. “I think convenience trumps all arguments for separate collection points. The mail slot is right by the mural that we pass every day, which makes it easy for us to check our coded messages at the same time we drop off our intel.”
“I was thinking of it for your sakes,” Bridgette said.
“And we are thinking of yours, ma chère amie,” Victoria said.
Bridgette swallowed at the tightness in her throat, but numbers won. “Very well, then,” she said. “Then let’s get on with the business at hand.”
Drinking flavorless tea and nibbling at something scalloped that passed for madeleines, Bridgette apprised the team of the revised list of shopkeepers in the Latin Quarter to trust and those to be wary of, churches to avoid, cafés under surveillance by the Gestapo. The safe house off the Place Saint-Michel has been rolled up, and Pierre Durant, the greengrocer, has been betrayed. As instructed by the major, she inquired about their jobs and living conditions. Were they settling in well enough? Would there be a problem getting enough to eat, keeping warm? These questions were necessary to ask in a country occupied by an enemy that had willingly left the French population to starve and freeze through a winter without energy sources to heat their homes.
Finally all had been said that could be said. Time for the team to break up. Bridgette rose, a signal that brought the others to their feet in the awkward silence of pending good-byes. This meeting would be their last together unless a diagonal mark appeared across the central dragonfly. From now on each dragonfly was to fly alone.