After giving Dirk Drechsler sufficient time to be off, Bucky headed for the metro that would deposit him within a few blocks of the site of the mural. He had delayed his departure until the sergeant had left the boardinghouse. Bucky had not wanted to risk the man foisting his company on him, or worse, following him. The traitor—a Texan, no less! There was no mistaking that accent—had taken a disturbing interest in him.
At first he’d thought the attraction had to do with his longing for a friend. The guy was pathetically lonely. If Bucky hadn’t despised him, he’d have felt sorry for him. His Nazi cohorts treated him like a stray dog cowering up to the back porch looking for handouts and wanted no part of him. Bucky had thought at first that the sergeant, desperate for companionship, had singled him out for no reason other than he needed a buddy, but he had given him no opening for friendship. It had been a strain to avoid him, but Bucky thought he’d successfully prevented any chance of the guy picking up a trace of behavior or speech that would betray him as a fellow American. Now, though, he wasn’t so sure.
Doubt had set in the morning following his meeting with his father in Honfleur almost three weeks before. At breakfast, Bucky had felt a definite change in the sergeant’s notice of him, heightened last Sunday after he witnessed Bucky’s shocked reaction at seeing Liverwort in Madame Dupree’s kitchen. Drechsler had thrown him a look as plain to read as the Nazi ACHTUNG signs set on every street corner. Drechsler impressed him as short on intelligence but long on instinct, and the knowing glance he’d flashed him as he left the kitchen two Sundays ago told Bucky that he knew he and Liverwort recognized each other and had kept silent, the question of why clear in Drechsler’s eyes. To cover the moment, Madame Dupree had casually mentioned at the supper table that monsieur had made her friend think she was seeing a ghost, he looked so much like someone now dead that she’d once known. Drechsler had looked as if he wasn’t buying it, and fear had coiled in Bucky’s gut that the turncoat might begin to sniff around the engineer’s job at a firm handling sensitive Nazi construction projects. Whether that flash of instinct included suspicion that Stephane Beaulieu was as American as he was, Bucky had no idea.
Of course there might be another explanation for the sergeant’s sharper attention. It was a stretch, but maybe the guy felt a romantic attraction to him. That was hardly attention he’d welcome, but a safer possibility than the others. Maybe he’d seen the beautiful Liverwort as competition. Whatever was behind the drill of those small, narrowed eyes, it was one more situation that Bucky knew he should report to the major, but he had held off. The other was his kitchen encounter with Liverwort. Their case officer would judge both as grounds for extractions, but Bucky wasn’t ready to abort his mission, not now that he was firmly in place. He was sure that Liverwort felt the same. Until he received orders from headquarters, he’d say nothing and do nothing, and he’d bet that Liverwort wouldn’t, either. He’d just have to be extra careful around Drechsler. Given time, the guy was bound to reveal his hand, and then Bucky would decide his next move.
The smell and crush of passengers on the metro to the Place Saint-Michel to check the mural made Bucky recall his trip to Honfleur and the reunion with his father. It had been a time of both pain and joy, a space of a few hours locked forever in his memory. An old woman showed him into the room where the legend sat cross-legged in a chair, a heavily draped window behind him. Never would Bucky forget the moment that he first laid eyes upon Nicholas Cravois, the storied Black Ghost—his father. He wore a beard and was bonier than Bucky had expected. The hardships of war and guerilla life had worn his tall frame to a razor sharpness. It took a son to detect his own likeness, and he could see it in his father’s body structure and eyes with their chameleon irises and thick lashes. They had stared at each other in a moment of breath-held silence, and then the legend had risen and spread wide his arms. “You have your mother’s shy smile,” he’d said in French. “The rest I can claim. Hello, my son.”
“You were brave to come over here to do what you are doing,” his father told him later, even though he’d ordered Bucky not to tell him his exact mission and place of work. It was dangerous enough that he knew his son’s address.
“Not really. I came solely to find you. The rest is…incidental.”
“But equally as perilous and risky.”
“Like father, like son.”
“A pity,” he’d said with a smile that expressed both regret and pride. His father had questioned him about his home, his education, the sports he liked. “Tell me about your life,” he’d invited.
So, while hardened men strapped with guns had stood lookout at doors and windows, and the old woman in her faded kerchief and apron had slipped in silently to serve them a bitter tea, Bucky had covered the missing years in Oklahoma.
“You learned the truth of your mother and me when you were fourteen, so I understand from your aunt.”
“Yes sir. By accident.”
“Does your mother know that…you know?”
“No sir, and Aunt Claire has vowed never to tell her.”
His father had wanted to know if his mother was happy. “Content, I’d say,” Bucky had replied.
“Ah,” he’d said, nodding in approval. “That is good. Happiness is most often short-lived. Contentment is more durable.”
His father asked if his family knew where he was and what he was doing in France, and Bucky had said they’d been told only that he was secluded in a highly secret job for the War Department and could not be contacted. Aunt Claire had promised not to reveal to them that he was in France.
“Aunt Claire possesses information not safe for us or her. I have made arrangements to get her out of Paris tonight. If you ever need to contact me—but only in case of extreme emergency,” his father warned, “leave word in the cavity of the plane tree in the park across from her chateau. It is the one that shades the bench by the stream. Should I need to contact you, you will find a black mark on the right underside of the first step of your boardinghouse. Couriers are too risky. Go to the tree.”
“Yes sir,” Bucky said.
Otherwise, they were not to meet again until the war was over. It was too perilous for them both. The house in Honfleur was to be closed, and his aunt’s chateau vacated but for a caretaker. Nicholas Cravois would disappear into the mountains, and Bucky would not see him again until France was liberated. Then he would contact him and they would reunite. “However,” he’d said, holding his son’s gaze with eyes the changeable hues of Bucky’s own, “if I do not survive, promise me that your American father will never learn the truth of your birth.”
“I promise,” Bucky had said.
Bucky had been thankful that Aunt Claire would be out of Paris. One more door closed to his discovery, he’d thought, until another had opened up with the unexpected appearance of Liverwort at the boardinghouse. Captain Achterberg had not noticed her start at seeing him, only her beauty. “Amazing,” he’d said. “I wonder who she is.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Bucky said.
He was approaching the convent wall. Despite the biting cold, since houses and apartments were no warmer anyway, a small group had gathered around the mural and others were approaching. Even on this freezing Saturday the usual policeman was standing about, puffed up with self-importance, mouth clamped tight and eyes steely beneath his billed cap. Bucky drew up behind a man whose height and size blocked him from the sweep of the cop’s surveillance and spotted the diagonal mark drawn through the central dragonfly. His heart did a little somersault when he noted the slightly deeper clouding of the tip of the North Star and the subtly darker shadings on the other code symbols.
Coat collar up and head drawn into his shoulders ostensibly for warmth, Bucky walked away quickly. He saw no sign of the others. He would not know which or if any member of Dragonfly had gotten Labrador’s message until they showed up in the tearoom today at four o’clock. No code had been devised for “message received.”
* * *
The engineer had not seen him, Dirk assured himself in satisfaction as he settled down at his observation post to await the Frenchman’s next move. He’d have liked the Nazi jerks who’d jeered at him in surveillance-training classes to have witnessed his street skills in avoiding detection after one hell of a long and boring day tailing his mark. Dirk could remember his instructor saying, “Herr Drechsler, in a yard of beehives, you would be about as undetectable as a bear in a beekeeper’s veil.” Well, he wished that horse’s butt could have observed his tradecraft management today. It wasn’t as if shadowing Beaulieu had been a walk in the park. As a matter of fact, the engineer seemed to have knowledge of a few tradecraft tricks himself. Every now and then he’d glance back over his shoulder or stop before a shop window, his gaze not on the display of goods but on the reflection in the glass of the street activity behind him. Now why was that? To see if he was being followed? It was another question mark to chalk up in the Stephane Beaulieu column.
It was now fifteen minutes until four o’clock. Dirk had tailed the engineer from the boardinghouse to the metro through the Latin Quarter in the opposite direction of Honfleur. There he’d walked aimlessly with no apparent destination in mind. He’d taken a gander at a painting on the wall of a convent with a lot of other people standing around admiring it. It was a thing of beauty dabbled on stone by somebody who must have wanted to bring a little sunshine to the street—the saints bless ’em, as his Lutheran mother would say. Then on the Frenchman had sauntered to the shops and bistros in the twisting streets of the fourteenth arrondissement. He had remained nowhere long. Then the engineer had checked his watch and set off with more purpose until just a few minutes ago, when he’d entered a little out-of-the-way tea and book shop up from the Catacombs. Dirk’s heart had begun to thump. The spot showed promise. Was Stephane meeting Nicholas Cravois there?
The street offered no protected site for street surveillance, but up ahead was a bell tower that looked older than his great-grandfather’s hay barn and as much in need of repair. The minute Stephane disappeared into the bookshop, Dirk hurried to it and found a joke of a rusted lock on the door. He picked it easily and creaked the door open on a small entryway. A flight of narrow stairs led to the belfry, which looked too rickety to hold his weight. Several loopholes were strategically placed around the chamber that allowed in air and afforded an outside view. Birds had built nests in them. Dirk cleared the one that gave him an unobstructed view of the street and shop across the way. If he could endure the cold and rat droppings under his feet and the squeaks and scurry of little feet in the belfry overhead, the opening offered an ideal lookout point.