Paris in September. Warm days, cool nights, sublime sunny skies. It was the Paris of his mother’s time—more modern, of course, but the magic that was the city of Monique Barton’s growing-up years had been restored. Bucky especially noticed the flowers. They were back in parks and on street corners and balconies, in the bicycle baskets of cyclists and the mesh bags of shoppers, explosions of intensely hued cosmos, Japanese anemones, dahlias, and the last of the season’s roses, a stable landscape around which the renewed, chaotic, glorious energy of Paris swirled.
Intent on his mission and destination, Bucky took in the differences between the Paris he’d left and the city to which he’d returned with only a cursory interest. Now, like then, he wished to find his father. His first stop after settling into his hotel in Passy-Auteuil was the villa of his aunt. He would visit Madame Dupree and the boardinghouse later, if they were still there. Now, like then, Aunt Claire did not know that he was in Paris. In fact, Bucky felt himself not that much changed since the last time he’d pressed the bell of her house.
A maid opened the door, and Bucky delivered the introduction of himself that he’d rehearsed in 1942. She ushered him into the pleasing sunlit room that he remembered, and he took a seat in one of its sumptuously upholstered chairs. His aunt, silver-haired but still slim and willowy at sixty-two, rushed into the room minutes later, expressing in fluting French her joy and surprise at seeing him, her dulcet voice sobering when she answered the question her nephew had come to ask: Where was his father buried?
“I will take you there,” she said.
First, Bucky told her, he had one more thing he must do and explained.
He walked across the street to the park where he’d met the man feeding the pigeons that cold winter day and made for the plane tree by the stream. The hole in the trunk was still there and Bucky, taking a chance that it was not the habitat of a creature that would take issue with the intrusion, thrust in his hand. His fingers felt something like age-stiffened plastic. Gingerly, he drew out the item and his heart began to pound as he unwrapped the waterproof covering of an envelope. He opened the flap and removed a letter dated August 17, 1944. “Dear son,” it began.
* * *
Alistair quickly located the house of Raina Desjardins in Lion-sur-Mer by consulting the fountain of all information in a village, its local priest. He had decided not to telephone beforehand in case the woman should put him off. He’d determined the best approach was simply to knock on her door with John Peterson’s book in hand—a gift from his local library, since only one other person had checked it out, and Alistair was a generous contributor at fund-raising time. He found her at home, a place from which she rarely stepped foot except to tend her garden, according to the priest. “A bit of a recluse and unapproachable since her paramour died,” he’d said. “We in the parish look after her as best as she’ll let us.”
But Raina Desjardins invited him in almost eagerly when Alistair explained in French in his most golden tones that he was an admirer of the late John Peterson’s work come from America to have a word with her about it, if she’d be so kind. He put her age at a well-worn seventy-something, and her house smelled of deeply embedded cat urine, but thank God the offenders were nowhere to be seen, Alistair thought, as he took a seat in her cluttered living room. Dogs were his choice if one must share a habitat with a four-legged creature. He declined her offer of tea and got right to the point, designed to flatter the author’s scholarship and remarkable attention to detail. Raina Desjardins preened at the praise and said that she would provide what help she could.
Alistair said that he was especially interested in the source that John Peterson had consulted for the last chapter of his book. Alistair thought he might know him and would like to make contact while in France.
The woman had to retrieve her reading glasses to refresh her memory of the last chapter. “Oh, yes,” she said, tapping her finger on the final page. “I very much remember Jean telling me about the man who told him this story. He couldn’t believe his luck in meeting him. The rest of the chapters are made up, you see, figments of Jean’s imagination, but this one was true. He’d always wanted to write about spies, and talking with this man gave him the idea for the subject and title of his book. They met in a bar in Germany.”
“Do you know his name?”
“No. It’s been so long ago, but…” Raina Desjardins brightened. “I still have Jean’s journal of notes for his book,” she said. “Perhaps the name is in there. Would you like to see it?”
“Yes, I very much would like to see Mr. Peterson’s journal,” he said. “I am so fascinated with my fellow countryman’s work.”
Alistair accepted a cup of tea after all, and his hostess left him alone to read while she went out to check on her garden. The journal was a mess. It would take patience to slog through his scrawl, but his hopes were up at the woman’s mention of the man in the bar, and he owed it to Dragonfly to leave no stone unturned. They all had begun to believe there was definitely something to Peterson’s story. Even if Victoria did not show up at the tearoom, Alistair was willing to believe that didn’t mean she wasn’t still alive. If there was a chance of finding a name, a scrap of information that might lead to her current whereabouts, his time and effort in a house that smelled like a litter box would be worth it.
He found it halfway through the author’s notes. His lungs protested from his excitement at the discovery and sent him into a fit of wheezing. The source was Karl Brunner. He claimed to be the driver of an important colonel of the SS in France during the German occupation. He would offer no further information on himself or persons or official positions for the author, but Alistair did not need them. He recognized the speaker as the driver for Colonel Derrick Albrecht, and knew the identity of the woman the colonel had rescued from execution. The whole conversation between John Peterson and the drunken German sergeant was laid out in black and white in the pages of the author’s journal. It told of the respect and admiration the driver had for his superior and of the colonel’s love for his beautiful French bout partner, a fencer of foil, who did not return his affections. When his superior discovered her to be a spy for the Allies, he concocted a scheme to save her from the firing squad, the plan matching almost word for word the text of the last chapter of John Peterson’s narrative. In his journal, but not in his book to protect the driver, the author had even included a paragraph in Karl Brunner’s own words: He loved her. He would have done anything for her. He even murdered for her. He poisoned a famous French author to save her from the Gestapo, an act in which I took part, but he refused to the end to implicate me to the French authorities. I was allowed to go free, but he went to prison, and the French eventually chopped off his head. After his execution, I took to bouts of drinking when the memories became too strong.
John Peterson did not mention that the woman the colonel saved from the firing squad was an American, so Alistair assumed that he believed, like the driver, that Victoria was French, thus the reason he claimed that she lived somewhere in Europe.
Alistair managed to draw in a deep breath, unmindful of the room’s stench. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he said. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
* * *
Brad and Chris stood before the imposing mansion once occupied by General Konrad March. “Looks the same, doesn’t it?” Brad said.
“Exactly as I remember,” Chris agreed. “I wonder if the people who live there now are the original Jewish residents or their children.”
“The owners might be if they managed to get out of Paris before they were arrested.”
“General March didn’t seem the type to live in a house confiscated from a family hauled off to the cattle cars,” Chris said.
“Madame Gastain would know.” Brad gestured toward the mansion next door. Hers was the next stop, the second for both of them. Brad’s first call had been to Captain Claude Allard, his OSS facilitator and owner of the fishing tour company where he’d been planted. The barnacled old riverboat captain’s jaw dropped when he happened to glance through his office window to see Brad stroll up the walkway to his boat to report in like always. He’d thrown open the door and met him halfway, arms wide and welcoming, exclaiming in French, “My boy! My boy! We thought you were dead!”
Chris received the same shocked, warm welcome when he visited the home of Jules Garnier, retired director of personnel at the Sorbonne. His wife ushered him into the garden where her husband was pruning roses. “Look who’s here,” she said, and Jules turned at her voice to squint at Chris through eyes clouded with cataracts. “Holy Mother of God,” he let out. “Are my eyes deceiving me at last? Can it be true? Herr Bauer, is that you? Are you really alive?”
Brad pushed Madame Gastain’s doorbell, he and Chris wondering aloud if her old butler would answer. Ancient when they knew him in 1942, the longtime family retainer had most likely gone to his heavenly reward. Neither was prepared when Hans Falk answered the door. After sharing a few seconds’ mutual shock of recognition, Hans said with a stiff little bow like always, “Gentlemen, how nice to see you again and looking so well. Should I let Madame Gastain know that you’ve come to call?”
Americans did not stand on ceremony when occasions called for emotional displays. Brad and Chris hugged him, and he returned their hearty embraces, tears in his eyes. They went into the drawing room that Brad well remembered and filled in one another while they awaited Madame Gastain’s entrance. Hans went first. When the general knew he was soon to be arrested, he’d dispatched his aide to the priest’s hole in his neighbor’s house next door. He did not witness Major General March’s arrest and would always regret not being by his side, but that was not what the general had wanted. When his mistress’s old butler died in 1945, he had stayed on as his replacement. He did not wish to return to the country that had executed one of its finest and most dedicated soldiers and general officers. Madame Gastain was well, except for occasional bouts of arthritis. They would find her charming as ever. She’d had to sell most of the house’s Old Masters, but they had fetched enough money to keep the mansion almost in the style to which it was once accustomed. Now Hans wished to hear of Wilhelm. Was the boy happy? Was he getting on well in America? How old was he now?
To Hans’s questions, Brad answered yes, yes, and twenty-six. He had graduated Regis University, a prestigious Catholic institution in Colorado, and was studying to become a priest. Again tears clouded Hans’s eyes. “His father would be proud,” he said.