As the month edged into December and the year drew to a close, heavy snow began to fall in Paris, cloaking the city in an endless dreamscape of white, sculpting even the trash in the gutters into fantastical monuments of artistic wizardry, the glacial silence of the blanketed streets so deep that a mere cough sounded like a small explosion.
Parisians would have found the fairyland of snow-draped trees and downy rooftops, icicle-studded eaves, and lacy windowpanes a beautiful setting for the celebration of Christmas but for the rumble of German trucks transporting weapons and soldiers and the disturbance of bullhorns blaring German propaganda, oompah music, and the day’s orders to the population. The presence of the Germans was like a fog of pollution hanging low over the city, and hatred for the occupiers increased by the day as their restrictions against French citizens tightened, reprisals for the Resistance’s actions grew more frequent, and the hunt for food and fuel to stave off starvation and hypothermia became more desperate. Only necessity drove the conquered out to the streets from the dubious safety and warmth of their homes.
“And now this!” Major General Konrad March raged, slapping at a street poster of a public notice before his usual audience of Brad, Chris, and Madame Gastain, who had been invited to partake of fondue and wine and the comfort of a blazing fire in his house. “To think this—this sacrilege against the meaning of Christmas has been imposed on children in Germany and now in France!”
Throughout the day, German soldiers had been about the city tacking up posters and thrusting flyers into the hands of pedestrians that forbade any display of the Christian elements associated with Christmas. French newspapers had already lined up behind the Nazi pronouncement that Christmas had nothing to do with the birth of Christ. The holiday was derived from the ancient practice of celebrating the winter solstice and the rebirth of the sun. Santa Claus was a Christian concoction inspired by the Germanic god Odin. The poster provoking the general’s disgust depicted a gray-bearded Odin astride a white charger with a sack of gifts on his back. The manger scene of Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus had been changed to a garden strewn with wooden animal toys.
“That’s not all,” Madame Gastain said. “The shops have been ordered to replace their usual Christmas toys with facsimiles of tanks, fighter planes, and machine guns. In one store today, I saw that the star on top of the Christmas tree had been replaced with a swastika.”
Chris said, “The posters went up in the school today. The staff has been ordered to instruct the students that Christmas is not about the coming of Jesus but the coming of Hitler and that they are to consider him the real savior of the world. He’s to be called Savior Führer.”
“Verdammt noch mal!” (Damn them!) Konrad exploded.
“I have lived too long,” Madame Gastain sighed.
Brad and Chris had noticed that the general’s tongue had become more unguarded around them, especially after he’d had a few glasses of schnapps. While not exactly careless, he was not as careful with the classified files he brought home, files that should have remained under lock and key at Abwehr headquarters, presumably because he did not trust his office staff. Brad reported that Konrad was also a little more open in discussing military matters with fellow officers aboard Captain Allard’s boat.
“What do you think? Deliberately indiscreet?” Brad questioned Chris.
“I’m not sure…What’s his game if he is?”
“Could be he simply trusts us?”
“I would think trust had been ironed out of him like the wrinkles in his uniform.”
But none of the intel picked up from the study desk and the fishing boat had come back to point a finger at them, so the two young operatives carried on.
Victoria, also, was careful not to accept too readily Colonel Derrick Albrecht’s trust in her. She could not fathom the man. How could a human being of such intellect, culture, and civility, an appreciator of the world’s great art and music and literature, the epitome of civilized man, belong to an inhumane organization like the SS? Daily reports circulated of SS brutalities that curdled the blood. She had witnessed for herself an SS officer calmly pull out his gun and shoot a civilian on the street, leaving him to die in a pool of blood in the snow for no other offense than his failure to step out of the officer’s way. The casual murder left Victoria so sick that she canceled an evening engagement with the colonel, unable to bear the sight of his uniform.
She no longer saw him alone. After their drive into the country to compensate for the aborted picnic, his invitations were to military social functions, dinner engagements with fellow officers, a cinema, or a restaurant party, his deportment toward her always meticulously correct and his company pleasant. The Nazi functions made her skin crawl, but they served up platters of intelligence that Victoria thought must surely water the mouth of even the jaded Major Renault.
Still, a small inner voice warned her to beware. A cobra lulled by the music did not mean that it was asleep.
Bridgette had no such fears. Free from Achim’s watchful eye, convinced that he had not reported her radio, she enjoyed the luxury of concentrating on the mural as a work of art apart from its purpose as a code pad. Between the lulls in snowfalls, it grew in size and depth and beauty and led to pleasant acquaintanceships among the locals and even with the soldiers of the German street patrols. She began to feel at home in the convent. She enjoyed mealtimes and chess matches with the nuns in the evening. Several of the Sisters of Charity, without a hint that they knew what she was up to, volunteered to stand as lookouts to warn her of the approach of German direction finders during the times she was at her wireless.
Bridgette’s one minor concern was the jealousy of several of Madame Boucher’s designers, who were known collaborators. The French fashion world and its schools of design comprised a small, closed society. From her first day at the fashion house, the designers had covertly expressed their perplexity at how madame had happened to hire an apprentice unknown to their sphere and afforded her special treatment and leeway to come and go as she pleased.
“Always something to keep you on your toes,” Bridgette sighed to the mother superior in confiding her impressions of her fellow coworkers.
“I will pray for your balance, ma chère amie, but you must take care,” Sister Mary Frances warned.
With Dirk gone, Bucky, too, could now enjoy a relatively safe home and work environment. His greatest and constant worry concerned the safety of his father. The Black Ghost made weekly headlines in underground newspapers. One afternoon, as Christmas approached, Bucky returned to the boardinghouse after work to find a fresh black mark on the underside of the bottom porch step. His throat clogged with fear. Early the next morning, he arrived in the park when not a single footprint marred the pristine, snow-covered grounds. Gone were the birds and the man with his paper sack. He was alone. Bucky stuck his hand into the eye of the tree and withdrew a note. My beloved, a Christmas package awaits you at CB.
Bucky sprinted across the street to Claire Bellerose’s house and rang the bell. It was instantly answered by his aunt’s old butler and caretaker, who, without a word, thrust a wrapped package into Bucky’s hand and closed the door. Taking the package to the bench in the park, Bucky unwrapped it. Tears immediately flooded his eyes. He held in his hands the yellow-fringed epaulettes worn by his father as a cadet officer and student at Saint-Cyr, France’s foremost military academy. “Happy Christmas, son,” read the accompanying note.
The Christmas letters to families were sent and received, an exciting event that called for another diagonal mark across the central dragonfly. In distributing them, Bridgette repeated Major Renault’s orders. “Read and destroy immediately after reading,” she said.
But of course none did, not immediately.
At the meeting, unless an emergency arose, the last they expected to have together for as long as their missions took, Victoria made a suggestion. “What do you say that we make a pact to have another reunion, right here in this café at four o’clock on September twenty-third, 1962?”
Silence fell. All understood the psychology behind the proposal. Liverwort was asking them to declare their faith that they would survive to gather for a twenty-year reunion.
“Well, why not?” she contended, meeting their silence with a determined thrust of her chin. “Don’t dragonflies always return to the river of their hatch?”
“That they do, Liverwort, that they do,” Brad said. He reached forward to lay his palm on the table and each set a hand upon it. “To September twenty-third, 1962, right here in this spot in Paris,” he said, and the others repeated in chorus, “To September twenty-third, 1962, right here in this spot in Paris.”
* * *
Victoria and Bridgette were the last to depart the café and walked out together. “What about you, Labrador?” Victoria asked, her voice gentle. “Was there no one back home to write to you? No family, friends?”
“My family and friends are here,” Bridgette said.
When she returned to her attic room that evening, a package wrapped in Christmas paper was waiting for her. The card inside read, “Merry Christmas from A. Renault.” Bridgette smiled. The present was a box that contained one of her favorite things: Michigan cherry jams.
Nineteen forty-two drew to a close. By December 31, the war news appeared a shade brighter for the Allies. The Red Army had the Germans penned at Stalingrad, successfully stopping their further advance into the USSR. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of the Afrika Corps, was trapped in Tunisia, and the British won a strategic naval battle in the Barents Sea against German ships that had been dispatched to destroy fourteen of His Majesty’s merchant ships carrying war materials to Russia.
On New Year’s Eve in Bern, Switzerland, the teetotalling Major Alistair Renault accepted a glass of champagne at a station party and raised it with the office crew to toast all Allied agents working on enemy soil and pray they would make it back alive and well. For his team of five young operatives, Alistair still had his fears, but so far the mice had escaped the cats, and Dragonfly was still in the game.