At the van, Colonel Derrick Albrecht ordered Mademoiselle Colbert brought inside the former Abwehr headquarters while Karl was to drive the others to an alternate location for the interrogation of prisoners. “Put them in the cell with the window overlooking the courtyard,” Derrick instructed.
“And Mademoiselle Colbert?” Karl dared to ask.
“She will remain here.” Derrick turned on his heel and struck off again for his office while Victoria was hoisted from the back of the van by SS personnel under the worried eye of Karl, unable to prevent her rough handling. Victoria managed to exchange only a brief glance with her three teammates before she was whisked away and the van doors slammed shut.
Her hands were rebound immediately after being untied to relieve her of her coat and to allow her to go to the toilettes, then she was taken to an interrogation chamber, where once again she was left under a hot, blinding light. Swallowing down nausea from a dry mouth, Victoria wondered if here she’d be made to strip. The colonel would like nothing better than to see her nude. Presently, he entered with a female SS corporal. He carried an instrument kit that looked like a metal plumber’s box with a swastika emblazoned on the lid. Victoria could see nothing in his face and manner to suggest that he was the man of civility and courtesy that she knew. He ignored her as he set the box upon the table.
“Corporal, take the prisoner back to the toilettes,” he ordered. “I don’t want a mess in here, but keep her hands tied until she is in the stall, then retie them when she leaves, and when you return her, make sure we are not disturbed.”
“Jawohl, Herr Colonel!”
The corporal, an oak tree of a woman, had been transferred from 84 Avenue Foch to Abwehr headquarters at the colonel’s request and was familiar with the contents of the black box. As she directed the prisoner to the toilettes, she studied Victoria’s face with its cut lip and said in fragmented French as she untied Victoria’s hands, “You’d better get a good look at that pretty Gesicht of yours in the mirror while you’re in here, mademoiselle. It will be the last time you’ll ever see it as it is now.”
Once re-bound and in the chair under the harsh ceiling light, the colonel dismissed the corporal and locked the door behind her. His glance fell on her cut, still-bleeding lip, and Victoria, glaring at him, expected him to produce another white handkerchief, but he walked around her chair. She flinched, expecting a blow to her head, but he merely checked her bonds. He then pulled up a chair directly in front of her and leaned close. “Listen to me very carefully, Victoria. I know you are an OSS spy. I suspected you were when I found that cyanide capsule in the lining of your coat, and I knew it for sure the day of our picnic when you swallowed the major’s report hook, line, and sinker, to borrow a phrase from American slang. I know about your cellmates in the van, the dead-letter box, the artist. Your cover is blown. The SS shoots enemy spies. So now you must do exactly as you’re told, you understand? Your execution is scheduled for the day after tomorrow, and I must prepare you for it.” He opened the black box.
* * *
After giving Henri instructions to clear out the house with the mail slot of any evidence identifying it as a dead-letter box, Alistair informed his decryption clerk of Labrador’s compromised transmission signal. Any information coming in from that quarter was to be discounted. He was to be informed when the first false transmission came in, proof that his radio operator had been taken and made to talk. Alistair returned to his desk with his head ready to explode. The glass of water he reached for shook in his hand, and the dribble he swallowed passed over his tobacco-coated tongue like acid and burned his throat going down. Bridgette had been arrested by the French Gestapo, the most barbarous of the Nazi police organizations. It would be only a matter of time before they broke her, that kitten with the heart of a lion. The others would be snagged at the letter drop unless their facilitators could get word to them quickly enough to save them. Alistair sat down heavily at his desk, put his hands together, and squeezed shut his eyes. He was not a spiritual man for all his love of liturgical music, but he commenced doing the only thing he knew now to do. He prayed.
* * *
“Well, Mademoiselle Dufor, it would seem that you are not as guiltless as you sound and certainly not as innocent as you look. A wireless transmitter was found in a hidden cupboard in your room at the Convent of the Sisters of Charity.”
The captain addressed Bridgette in the late afternoon, after she’d sat for three hours shackled to her chair in the hall. She had not yet been dragged up to the third floor like several other struggling prisoners shoved through the doors of the headquarters of the French Gestapo, but she had endured her own brand of torture waiting for the moment when she would join them. Finally, the captain once again had her deposited before his desk, where he looked at her hard and long, as if searching for something he had missed before.
“Can you explain its presence?” he asked.
The captain hoped that his stony gaze and her fear of the upstairs cells would be sufficient to loosen her tongue, and they could get this over with. He was tired and wanted to go home. The girl might have fooled him, but he was inclined to believe his first impressions of her. She was probably a very good dress designer, and she clearly possessed talent as a painter, but that little blond head was too innocent to worry with wireless sets and code murals and secret messages passed on the sly. No search revealed an encryption pad by which to check her handwriting, and the mother superior of the convent declared that if her boarder had been transmitting messages, she would have known. Nothing the informant, posing as a blind man and beggar, had brought to the Carlingue had panned out. The informant’s claim that the mail slot in the house next to the convent was a dead-letter box proved false. It was a storage room for sewing materials in line with Bernadette Dufor’s work, and a check of the mural found nothing to indicate that it was any more a code device than his wife’s grocery list. The stone painting was an amazing piece of artwork. Demolishing it would incite more trouble in that district than the French police were capable of handling at this explosive time. The captain believed her story about her divorced aunt, too, and a French interpreter of English could detect no trace of an American accent in her French speech. The damned informant had misread her.
But there was the point of the wireless to be explained. “Well?” he demanded.
Bridgette had her story ready. “I…was approached by two men of the French Resistance demanding to use my room to operate their wireless set. They would transmit their messages while I was at work and during the hours the nuns were out of the convent,” Bridgette said, doe eyes beseeching the captain to believe her. “They wanted the convent because its thick walls provided protection from the German direction finders. They would not take no for an answer.”
“How did they know about your room and the hidden alcove?”
“They said a former nun who left the order told them.”
The captain had heard of a nun joining the partisans, reputed to be a crack shot. “How could they force you to permit them to use your room?”
“They…threatened to kill me and the mother superior. When I refused, they pushed a French policeman, known in the neighborhood as the guardian of the wall and protector of the mural—the sweetest man who ever lived—into the path of an oncoming train as proof they meant what they said.”
The captain had read of the policeman’s death in the papers. Shocking.
“And how would they have gained access to your room without being noticed?”
“They entered by the fire escape when I was at the fashion house. I…was to leave the attic window unlatched and my door unlocked.”
“What about their names? What did they look like?”
“I do not know, but I would recognize them again, that’s for sure.”
The captain made a note. “Did you ever learn their call signal?”
“The what?”
“Never mind. Did anybody else in the convent know what was going on?”
“No, Capitaine, no one.” Her voice had faltered to a frightened whisper.
The captain believed her. Every point of her story bore out as the truth. He should have her arrested for her cooperation with the Resistance, but the girl had had no choice. She was clearly innocent of covert activity. “Very well, Mademoiselle Dufor,” he said, riffling some papers to appear official, “ I see no reason to detain you longer—”
Suddenly the door burst open, and the German SS commandant of the Drancy internment camp, accompanied by a woman and several other SS men, filed into the room. Behind them, the captain’s desk clerk lifted his shoulders and spread his hands in frightened apology for the break-in.
The captain leaped to his feet. “May I help you, Herr Commandant?”
“That’s her,” the woman said, pointing at Bridgette. “That’s my designer.”
“She is coming with us, Capitaine. Madame Richter has need of her services,” her husband ordered.
The captain would not have dreamed of protesting. Besides outranking him, the commandant was a member of the SS. The French captain acquiesced gracefully and quickly, glad to be rid of the problem of Mademoiselle Bernadette Dufor. “She’s all yours, Herr Commandant,” he said.