The Paris Spy (Maggie Hope Mystery #7)(49)

Despite the scattered raindrops, men in worn shirts with rolled sleeves, flannel trousers, and suspenders sold a seemingly infinite variety of plants. Beautiful, fragile, ephemeral flowers were the one commodity so perishable that Germans couldn’t ship them home. And so fuchsia azaleas in clay pots were for sale next to tin buckets of crimson and lemon roses. Sarah walked past rows of cut flowers, unseeing.

A man was following her. When she stopped to sniff a poppy, he stopped as well. In her peripheral vision, she noted he was trim and athletic, well dressed in a dark suit and snap-brim hat, with the posture and mannerisms of a German. She wandered the aisles, seemingly idly shopping for flowers, but watching him closely. Wherever she went, he followed.

Sarah knew it was over. She broke and ran, weaving between shoppers, pushing over vases full of flowers to slow him down. Water splashed across the pavement; her sunglasses fell off. The man swore and gave chase, hurdling over the upended buckets.

As merchants yelled and shoppers looked on in horror, her pursuer shouted, “Stop! Gestapo!” and pulled a Luger from inside his suit jacket.

Sarah turned a hard corner and made eye contact with one of the vendors, a swarthy, square man with thick, hairy forearms. He nodded, and she slipped into his stall, crouching behind tiered buckets of flowers.

“Where did she go?” the German demanded of the man and the customers, gun in hand. “Wo ist sie?”

Everyone remained mute.

“Wo ist sie?” the German insisted.

The vendor met his glare with stony silence. The rest looked down and shuffled their feet.

Finally, in frustration, the German kicked over a stand holding cups of lavender in frustration, then ground the wet blooms under his black boots. Muttering profanities, he made one more loop through the marché before stomping off.

The vendor watched him go. When the coast was clear, he nodded to Sarah, crouching behind the bank of flowers.

“Thank you, monsieur,” she said, picking a pink rose petal out of her hair as she rose and turned to go.

His dark face creased in a sad smile. “Give ’em hell, mademoiselle.”

—

Bar Lorraine, on an anonymous side street, was deserted. The room was shadowy and narrow; the bottles behind the dark wood bar were empty. The cracked tile floor was crowded with small square tables. The owner, Marco Mayeux, was cleaning for the afternoon and evening ahead; the bentwood chairs were up on the marble bistro tables as he mopped the floor. Mayeux was somewhere in his seventies, with tiny, round eyeglasses, a coarse mustache, and a shirt buttoned to the top under a gray hand-knit sweater vest. Suddenly noticing the quiet, he stopped cleaning.

“Delphine?” he called to his wife, who often worked with him. Usually she was chattering away, or singing along to the wireless. But the café remained silent. “Delphine, where are you?” Shoving the mop back into the bucket with a splash of dirty water, he wiped his hands on his smudged apron.

He found her in the kitchen, bound to a chair and gagged. Two SS officers holding Walther pistols towered over her. A long-legged and elegant German in civilian clothes perched on a stool nearby. “Gestapo,” the man said by way of laconic explanation.

Mayeux, stunned, looked from his wife’s terrified eyes to those of the seated man.

“Monsieur Marco Mayeux.” The German lit a cigarette. “You and your lovely wife are peaceful, law-abiding citizens, are you not?”

“Of—of course, sir.” The man’s voice was tight with fear.

“You have no contact with the so-called Resistance?”

The blood left Mayeux’s face. “No.”

“You do not run a letter drop for British terrorists?”

“N-no.”

“You lie.” The German looked thoughtful. “I know for a fact you collaborate with the English terrorists, with one of their Paris networks.” He looked to the men. “Oh, why prolong this? I need to return to the office.” He waved the hand with the cigarette, creating an arc of smoke. “You may proceed.”

One SS officer shot Delphine and then Mayeux in the head.

“You,” the seated man said to the first gunman. “You’re his cousin, from Aix. You’ll be running the café now.”

“Yes, Herr Obersturmbannführer.” The gunman fingered the long, ragged scar on his cheek.

“You,” the officer said to the second. “You’ll stay in the back, with the guns.”

“Yes, sir! But—won’t the British agents expect to find him?” He pointed at Mayeux’s corpse with the snub tip of his Walther.

Von Waltz stood, tossed his cigarette to the floor, then crushed it under his heel. “Not if they’ve never been to Bar Lorraine before. You’re the cousins, called in to take care of everything while they’re away. Everything.”

“When do we start?”

“Why, you already have,” von Waltz answered, brushing ash from his long black leather coat. He gestured to a dirty apron hung from a wooden peg. “No time like the present!”





Chapter Ten




At Bar Lorraine, a pair of wizened men in denim coveralls played backgammon. A woman in a striped dress and shapeless gray cardigan sat in one corner, reading the paper, eating what looked to be dandelion salad, while a man with hunched shoulders played la belle lucie with worn cards. The burly barkeep was doing a crossword puzzle with a broken pencil, the newspaper spread over the zinc counter.