That evening at eight o’clock on the dot, Bridgette faithfully withdrew her suitcase radio from a spacious recess hidden behind a panel concealed by an armoire in her attic room. The space had been built during the French Revolution to hide aristocrats on the run from the guillotine. She waited with no expectation that the wireless instrument, volume turned low, would speak to her. It seldom had, and then only briefly, in all the nights she’d sat before the box with pen and paper in hand. When she sent transmissions, the response was merely Copy that. Great work.
But this evening, the long and short sounds of dit and dah cracked the silence. Bridgette wrote hurriedly, for the transmission was brief. The decrypted message read: D meet 1600/31. Further transcribed, the text ordered Dragonfly to gather at four o’clock the following day, Saturday, October 31, at the tea and book shop. Bridgette stared at the summons in alarm. It meant that an emergency had flared up.
Bridgette tapped a reply: Copy that. Awaiting further instructions. An answer came back after several anxious minutes, as if the major was considering a reply: Nothing more.
She had no idea what times her teammates checked the wall during the weekdays or weekends. Her working hours were long. She was required to report to La Maison de Boucher by eight and did not return to the convent until six, and weekends her appearances to paint were irregular. So far no member of the team had left a code mark on their symbols, nor had she been called upon to leave messages for them. She had not seen a dragonfly since the operation began. Their intel appeared on the other side of the door of the mail drop as if deposited by ghosts. Bridgette guessed they melted in with the increased foot traffic taking the Rue des Soeurs de Charité on their way to and from work. Achim had spoken of no one suspicious, and Bridgette was sure that he would have bragged of accosting someone he even slightly suspected of mischief.
So, tomorrow, a few minutes prior to the lift of the morning curfew, she would slip down to the mural before Achim Fleischer planted himself before the wall. He had told her proudly that he planned to stand his watch earlier than usual on Saturday mornings, when he calculated vandals would be most likely to strike between shifts of the German street patrols.
The policeman had surprised her. Bridgette had expected him to become bored with his sentry detail by now, but he basked in the attention he received as “guardian of the wall” and took great pride in his diligence that so far, he believed, had protected the mural from defacement. One day a small park bench, hand carpentered, had appeared beside the painting to give his legs a break. Residents dropped off cups of tea and occasionally, at the bidding of parents barely able to feed them, children slipped a sweet or item of fruit into Achim’s hand. Daily, he was asked to pose for snapshots and sign autographs.
Bridgette’s amazement at the neighborhood’s reception of the mural was surprising as well. As word of the painting grew, it had gained an even broader audience. Residents from other districts had begun visiting it. German soldiers and their girlfriends sought it out on weekend strolls. Art students studied it as an exhibit. Flowers were left at the foot of the wall. At first, to explain her presence and allay suspicion should she have to stroke in a code mark, Bridgette made a point to appear with palette and brush to add more depth and color to a stargazer, a lily pad, a cloud. For Bridgette, her palette and brush provided escape from days of catering to the demands of revolting wives and mistresses whose illusions of superiority were based solely on the authority their husbands and lovers wielded over a subjected people. At times she almost forgot the purpose of the mural.
Afraid that she would oversleep, that night Bridgette hardly closed an eye. The penetrating cold made a good night’s rest impossible anyway. A few days before, the farmer who had supplied wood for the convent had been shot for harboring a family of Jews. Fifteen minutes before six o’clock, Bridgette grabbed her brushes and paints and slipped down the flight of narrow stairs to the courtyard, creaked open the ancient door bolted during the night, and poked her head out. The street was empty and quiet but for the forlorn barking of a dog far off in the Latin Quarter. Quickly, under the murky glow of the blue-shrouded streetlamps, she drew a thin diagonal line through the mural’s central dragonfly and added a few strokes of shadows to the other symbols as a warning to beware of a trap.
Minutes later, precisely at six o’clock, Achim Fleischer, beside himself, pounded on the bolted courtyard door until a little nun, dispatched from morning prayers, came running to see what the hammering was all about. She slid open the pocket door of the small window, and inquired, out of breath, how she might be of help to monsieur.
“You can unlock this damned door, for one!” Achim shouted into the wide eyes peering through the grillwork. Once the bolt was thrown, he pushed by the black-robed figure to march down the walk, fling open the convent door, and stomp into the nuns’ communal living quarters demanding to see Sister Mary Frances. The mother superior appeared a few minutes later.
“What is this all about, Achim?”
“You must summon Mademoiselle Dufor, immediately!” he ordered.
“She is in bed.”
“Wake her up!”
“May she be told why?”
“Somebody has desecrated the mural! And on my watch, too.” Achim’s vocal rage thinned to a whine like a sail suddenly depleted of wind power. “She’s got to do something to repair it immediately before the Saturday crowd starts coming.”
“She will be in her nightgown.”
“I don’t give a fiddler’s…bow if she’s wearing her birthday suit. Get her down here right now.”
Sister Mary Frances turned calmly to one of her charges. “Pray be good enough to summon Mademoiselle Dufor, Sister.”
“And tell her to bring a paint cleaner!” Achim shouted to the nun’s retreating back.
Bridgette, shivering in her night-robe, considered the “desecrated” dragonfly and Achim’s assertion that “something different” had also been done to the painting that he couldn’t figure out.
“Achim, the only change I see is a thin white line of a medium I can’t identify drawn through a dragonfly, not enough to disfigure the mural. The stone is porous, so I must determine the correct cleaning product to remove it. Mineral spirits and turpentine will only smear it.”
“No they won’t. You primed the wall. I saw you. The mark should come off easily. Give me that turpentine and I’ll show you!” Achim reached to snatch the bottle of paint remover from Bridgette’s hand.
Bridgette whipped the container behind her back, heart pounding. The diagonal line must stay untouched. “No!” she said. “You’ll ruin the dragonfly. I will not be able to restore it as it once was. The mural is my work of art, not yours, Achim. You’re just upset because you think the mark is somebody’s way of thumbing their nose at you, but it’s just a tweak, mon ami, barely noticeable.” She put a hand on his arm and said quietly, “Be thankful it wasn’t worse. The fact that it wasn’t shows respect for the mural and for you. It was just a small prank done without malice, not likely to happen again.”
The fire dimmed in Achim’s eyes. He enjoyed the gentle touch of Mademoiselle Dufor’s hand on his arm, and he had just noticed the outline of her body through her flowing night-robe. “My sister had trouble correcting her artwork with turpentine, now that I remember,” he acquiesced. “All right. I’ll let it stand. You are shivering. Forgive me. You must go inside, but if I ever catch the person who did this…”
“I’m sure that person will be in serious trouble,” Bridgette said.