The Paris Spy (Maggie Hope Mystery #7)(23)
Chanel pressed her lips together as she removed a gold-tooled leather box. Inside was a syringe. “Did I make any notes?” she asked, taking out the syringe. She again went through the drawer until she found what she was looking for: an ampoule of clear liquid.
“We have Mademoiselle Kelly’s height as five foot seven and recorded her measurements as thirty-three, twenty-four, thirty-six.”
“All right, then,” the couturiere said with a resigned sigh as she filled the syringe. “Close enough.”
“Oh, mademoiselle, there is one more thing—”
Chanel, making sure there were no air bubbles in the needle, squirted a few drops of morphine-based Sedol into the air. “Yes?”
“You wrote in the margins that Mademoiselle Kelly was a blonde. A natural blonde…Mademoiselle?”
“That is all.” Chanel hung up the receiver. “Blonde,” she muttered, eyes narrowing.
As the couturiere pricked the needle into her upper thigh, she murmured, “This little puzzle could make the evening much, much more fun than I anticipated.”
Chapter Five
As were the other important buildings in Paris, the Palais Garnier—the grand opera house, home to the Paris Opéra Ballet—was shrouded in Nazi flags. Their presence negated the beauty of the arched windows, the double columns, the gilded adornments, and the graceful statuary, as did the sign on the front doors: INTERDIT AUX JUIF.
A group of young German soldiers had clustered together on the front steps, singing:
Deutschland erwache aus deinem b?sen Traum!
Gib fremden Juden in deinem Reich nicht Raum!
Wir wollen k?mpfen für dein Auferstehn
Arisches Blut soll nicht untergehn!
“Mackerel sky, mackerel sky—Never long wet and never long dry,” Sarah Sanderson muttered to herself as she walked quickly past the assembled Germans. She moved gracefully in her raincoat and jewel-toned Hermès scarf, despite the heavy dance bag she toted over one shoulder. But Sarah knew enough German to be able to understand the song’s menacing lyrics:
Germany, awake from your nightmare!
Give foreign Jews no place in your Reich!
We will fight for your resurgence!
Aryan blood shall never perish!
She turned her head to avoid the sight of the assembled Germans. Two wizened women in black were walking arm in arm, followed by several giggling schoolchildren, and a mother pushing a pink and chubby-cheeked baby in a pram. She caught the baby’s eyes and smiled; the infant rewarded her with a gurgle and a waved fist.
Sarah, a slim brunette from Liverpool, had performed with the Vic-Wells Ballet in London. But now, as an SOE agent, she was posing as a dancer with the Paris Opéra. She’d already taken daily class with the company that morning and had put in an afternoon’s worth of rehearsals. Her long legs felt close to collapse, but there was still one more rehearsal onstage before the performance that evening. And then, after the ballet, was her actual SOE mission.
As she passed the singers, she saw a lanky French policeman in his gendarme uniform and cape walk by without saluting. A German sergeant, a dumpy man, with a florid, spongy face, wasn’t about to let the perceived slight go unpunished. “You!” he roared.
The policeman stopped, spun around, and saluted smartly. “My apologies, sir—I didn’t see you.”
Sarah had spent her childhood summers in Paris with her grandmother, on ?le St.-Louis. She knew firsthand Parisians had always enjoyed making jokes about buffoonish policemen. At the same time, there was a genuine affection for Monsieur L’Agent. Most French police officers had an easy and kindly manner. They seemed to represent the spirit of a free country. And they had never been required to salute French Army officers.
When the Germans arrived, all that had changed, and the French police had been turned into the Milice, the German-run military police.
“You will stand at attention!” the German sergeant bellowed.
The policeman did.
“You will salute me!”
The policeman did.
“And now you must run three times around the Palais.”
Sarah turned away, her heart constricting with deepest shame at the humiliation of the Parisian police.
Passing through the back doors of the Palais Garnier, she stepped into an austere world the public never saw: a realm of classes and rehearsals and hard work and sweat—far, far away from the glamour and gilt of the front of the theater. It had survived on orders from Joseph Goebbels, who’d instructed that Paris’s wheels of gaiety—music, dance, and theater—must keep turning at whatever cost.
She strode down a long corridor with plain stone floors, hearing the squeak of violins warming up and seeing a throng of wiry, long-limbed dancers, thick woolen leg warmers and sweaters over their practice clothes, congregate like Edgar Degas figures before a cork bulletin board. They smelled of fresh sweat, face powder, and sweet perfume. Pinned in the center was a sheet of thick paper embossed with a black swastika.
“What’s this?” Sarah asked one of the coryphées in her deep, raspy voice, as she, too, rose on tiptoe to see.
“More decrees against the Jews,” the younger dancer replied.
In the two years since the Occupation, the Nazis had passed anti-Semitic legislation in France, the Statut des Juifs. Jews were now excluded from public life, dismissed from positions in the civil service and the military, and barred from jobs in industry, commerce, medicine, law, and teaching. They were even forbidden to use public telephones. Thousands of Jewish businesses had been seized throughout France; Jewish-owned art and property had been “repossessed.”