Sundays, Achim Fleischer took a break from his guard duty, but on Saturdays he stayed until the Jewish curfew, when he was relieved by the presence of German patrols in the area. Bridgette was therefore surprised when she returned to the convent Saturday after the meeting at La Petite Madeleine and did not find him at his post, nor was he there this Monday morning of November 2 as she set off for La Maison de Boucher. The day had broken foggy and rain was forecast, but, like the American mailman, Achim Fleischer had so far allowed neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night to stay him from his appointed rounds. Had he become ill?
With a nick of concern, Bridgette looked up and down the street for a glimpse of his rain gear, the white cap and cape worn by municipal policemen, but the Rue des Soeurs de Charité offered no sign of him. Bridgette stood a moment in the thick fog and silence. His absence was unsettling. The street seemed eerily empty without him. He had become a fixed feature of her morning. When no one was about who raised suspicions of imminent mischief, he would walk with her to the corner and see her off to the metro with a wish that she enjoy her day.
Bridgette was now more convinced than ever that Achim Fleischer was no threat to the clandestine activity going on behind his back. The focus of the street’s watchdog was on the protection of the mural—and on her. If he’d noticed the Dragonfly foursome at all, Victoria especially, he took them for ordinary residents of the neighborhood whose jobs took them daily past the house next door. No danger on that score.
Bridgette recognized her hollow feeling as having little to do with Achim Fleischer. He was just another question mark on a cold, dreary morning when she was wondering when or if she’d ever see her friends again. Her first thought after the alarm clock went off was that if they’d elected to catch those Lysanders, they’d all be waking up in the safety and warmth of Milton Hall, a little hungover after an evening at the Crown and Scepter, their stomachs still full of the pub’s crunchy fish and chips. In a few days, they’d be heading home, addresses exchanged and plans in place to meet earlier than the date in New York.
The Frenchman plainly believed—as did the major—that they would not survive. The poor man had been horrified at their unanimous vote to remain. His face had drooped longer than a basset hound’s at their decisions. As they got up to leave, he’d heard the scrape of their chairs as cell doors slamming and coffin lids closing. “Your case officer is not going to like this,” he’d said, to which Liverwort had replied in her serene way, “We know.”
Achim Fleischer, while an irritating pebble in her shoe, represented familiarity and stability. His absence simply increased her feeling of being alone and lonely on a day that offered no salvation from her gloomy mood. She missed her friends terribly. Seeing them for such a short while yesterday was like a drop of water on a thirsty tongue, and today Frau Helga Richter, the reigning witch from hell, was to come in for a fitting. She was the wife of Sturmbannführer Gottlob Richter, the SS major in charge of the notorious Nazi transit facility in Drancy, a suburb northeast of Paris. The camp was a holding tank to house Jews until they could be transferred to concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, where it was rumored they would be gassed. Horror stories had leaked out about the brutality of the guards and inhumane living conditions under the whip of Major Richter that, at the risk of their jobs, the staff of the House of Boucher had been warned not to bring up to his wife.
Meeting the woman would discourage even the bravest from ignoring the warning. Flat where she should have been round, round where she should have been flat, possessing the taste of a Parisian streetwalker and the disposition of a killer shark, the woman expected fashion miracles to atone for nature’s cruel injustices to her figure. It was Bridgette to whom she looked to wave her magic wand or, in this case, to apply her drawing pencils.
Having heard the horror stories about Frau Richter, Bridgette had expected the woman to greet her in the haughty manner of other customers who would look her up and down, then say contemptuously to Madame Boucher, “I want an accomplished dress designer to attend me, not a child apprentice.” But surprisingly, Frau Richter had taken one look at her and said simply, “Stick me with a pin, midget, and I will slap you.” So, no problem with acceptance there.
That was the word—acceptance—that Bridgette had been looking for to explain her connection to the team of Dragonfly and Major Renault. Right from the start, they’d all accepted her as she was. She had not had to prove her right to the spot she’d earned. She had not been judged instantly and treated as younger than her age or as delicate as her size suggested. None had addressed her irritatingly, indulgently with asinine tags like little bit, short stuff, or Pee Wee. They had not kindly rushed to her aid during training to offer an unsolicited hand where taller, stronger, smarter people prevailed. They had cut her no slack, given no quarter, nor set the tee box forward. They had trusted her to be their equal in strength and intelligence and capability. How could she not feel connected to people like that? How could she not feel as if…well, it was like being among family?
But the realist in her could not help but anticipate the obstacles that got in the way of the staunchest friendships enduring. As she’d tried to point out to Gladys, time corroded bonds, memories faded, loyalties fossilized. They were the facts of life. Bridgette supposed the weight of that eventuality was responsible for the particular depression she was feeling this morning, so much so that she’d even looked forward to Achim Fleischer’s smiling face and friendly greeting.