The Paris Spy (Maggie Hope Mystery #7)(50)
At the bar, a German with a camera around his neck ordered a glass of vermouth in French. “Sorry for my accent,” he said, reaching in his pocket for coins.
“No, it is très jolie,” joked the barkeep.
The restaurant stilled to absolute silence.
“It is not,” protested the German, his face creasing in a wide grin. The atmosphere eased instantly, and the woman in the corner gave a nervous chortle of laughter.
Sarah arrived, out of breath, and waited for the man behind the bar to finish at the brass cash register. “May I see Jeanne-Marie, the daughter of Ora?” she asked, as she’d been instructed.
When the barkeep replied, “Jeanne-Marie’s not here,” Sarah very nearly turned and ran.
The right response, the one she’d been schooled to expect, was “Don’t you mean Babs?”
The man noted her panicked expression. He added, in a lower voice, “My brother, who owns the café, is on holiday. I’m helping him out this week. In all ways.”
Sarah—sleep-deprived, hungry, and heart still pounding from her run-in with the undercover SS officer—nearly collapsed with relief. She whispered, “Thank you.”
The barkeep nodded, and one of the waiters went to her, leading her through the tables to the kitchen. The waiter rapped at a door three times, then opened it. Inside, it was dark.
When he flipped on the overhead lights, Sarah winced against the glare, then let out an anguished cry.
“Bonjour, madame,” an SS man in a black leather coat said, his gun pointed at her. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
—
When Maggie left the House of Ricci, half the sky was a brilliant blue, the other dark with clouds. She held up one palm, testing for rain.
Feeling no drops, she melted into the crowd of pedestrians going to the green-and-white-tiled Madeleine Métro station and followed them down the stairs. As the train arrived, she got on, but then bolted from the car at the very last moment—watching to make sure she wasn’t being followed. As she walked back up the stairs to the street, a sudden breeze from the departing train tugged at her skirt, making it flutter around her legs. Feeling exposed, she did her best to smooth it down while walking as fast as she could in her fashionable shoes.
She emerged aboveground and doubled back: pausing before shop windows, checking who was around her in the reflections, relying on her memory to spot someone, anyone, familiar. She started when she noticed the pencil in her bun. It was unusual, it stood out, and it could get her made if she wasn’t careful. She plucked it out and tucked it into her purse, trying to look absentminded rather than terrified.
At a bookshop a few blocks away, she ignored the prominently displayed photograph of Pétain to peruse the titles on a table at the front—St. John Perse’s Exil, Salvador Dalí’s memoir, and a translation of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
“Do you have a first edition of The Man in a Hurry by Paul Morand?” Maggie asked the shopkeeper, a man with dark, bushy hair and a round baby face; he was missing one arm, the shirtsleeve pinned up.
“No, mademoiselle. But you might try Librairie Michel Descours. Do you know it?”
Maggie smiled. “I’m afraid not.”
“I will give you the address,” he said, writing it down in tiny letters on a scrap of paper. As if on the trail of a rare tome, Maggie went to three more booksellers asking for The Man in a Hurry.
Finally reassured, she walked to a gated apartment building on an elegant square overlooking a park. The building had been designed in a flamboyant Art Deco style, looking almost like an ocean liner or a Miami Beach hotel. The entrance was black wrought-iron double doors; 2B had a placard inscribed HESS. On the pavement in front, children tried to catch pigeons with butterfly nets.
As Maggie considered her options for getting past the building’s front gate, dark green tanks flying red-and-black swastika flags, moving slowly as if in funeral procession, lurched down the street. She repressed a shudder.
The horizon had turned mackerel again, with odd patches of alternating dark and light. A dappled sky, like a painted woman, soon changes its face popped into her mind. While the tank cavalcade passed, a slight man in a tweed suit, carrying a battered leather portfolio, walked by.
As he opened the gate, Maggie went up to him and smiled. He nodded, then held the gate, as well as one of the building’s double doors, for her. As a young woman dressed in haute couture, even if a few seasons old, she aroused no suspicion.
She made her way up the circular steps; at the door of 2B, she knocked. Once, twice, three times. Then, looking around to make sure she was alone, she pulled a hairpin from her low bun to jimmy the lock.
The flat had high ceilings, boiserie detailing, and honey-colored parquet floors. The foyer was dominated by a Botke painting, White Peacocks in a Forest, reminding Maggie of the proud birds at the Hess estate in Wannsee, Berlin. Beyond the foyer, the Art Deco rooms were fashionable—Hollywood glamour, gilt mirrors and glass—but now dusty and unused, with the furniture shrouded in sheets. She took the grand marble staircase to the second floor.
In what looked to be Miles Hess’s study, the walls were dominated by two original oil paintings: one of Maggie’s mother, Clara Hess, in costume as Isolde from the Wagner opera, above the enormous marble fireplace; the other, on the opposite wall, of her half sister, Elise, as a child, standing in what Maggie knew was the garden of their villa. On Miles’s desk stood a silver-framed photograph of the three of them—Miles, Clara, and Elise—on a ski lift with craggy mountain peaks behind them.