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.
A family, Maggie thought, feeling a sudden stab of longing and despair. And where do I fit in? Not here, that’s for certain.
She carefully examined everything in the library before going to the private rooms. In one of the bathrooms she found a short golden hair in the sink basin—Elise’s! she thought triumphantly. She’s been here. Maggie’s arms prickled with goosebumps. It was evidence, confirmation that Elise had been to the apartment since she’d escaped from SOE in January.
Everything in what must have been Elise’s room was covered in sheets and dust, but in a grouping on the bureau, Maggie found a small silver-framed picture of her half sister, dressed for a party or dance. She slipped it into her pocketbook.
But though Maggie combed meticulously through the rest of the apartment, that was all she could find—no further signs of Elise, no clue to where she might have gone.
Then, in the study, she realized the plush carpeting had recently been walked over by someone wearing muddy shoes. Someone had come in and gone to the bookcase on the right side of the fireplace.
A secret room? Excitement jolted through her. She pressed on various panels. Nothing.
She pushed and then pulled on each volume in the bookcase. Nothing.
In frustration, she thumped her fists on the wooden shelves themselves. Nothing happened, except her hands became sore.
Muttering a few choice curses, Maggie flung herself into one of the chairs.
A dead end, she realized, kicking her feet like a disappointed child. Elise might have come back here to the flat, but now she could be anywhere—Switzerland, Spain, Portugal…Even back to Berlin—who knows?
Maggie stilled, her face hot with shame, feeling every inch the fool. Her impulsive journey to France, her quest to find Elise, was stupid, pathetic—a pipe dream. Her sister obviously didn’t want to be found, didn’t want anything to do with Maggie.
In this empty flat in a hollowed-out city, Maggie had never felt so terribly alone in her life.
Come on, Hope, she scolded herself firmly, finally rising. You’ve tied up enough SOE resources. It’s over. Erica Calvert is dead and Elise doesn’t want to be found. You’re done. It’s time to go home.
The chimes of church bells striking the hour could be heard through the closed windows. Bells! Elise had once wanted to be a nun. Even in Paris, even on the run, Maggie felt certain that Elise would have gone to Mass, and most likely gone to the neighborhood church.
Maybe someone there, at the church, has seen her?
She opened the shutters, then peered out the window, catching a glimpse of the pointed spire of a Gothic church tower, guarded by medieval gargoyles.
Well, as long as I’m here, she decided, giving her nose a good blow and squaring her shoulders, what can it hurt to try?
—
Not far away, at 84 Avenue Foch, Professor Franz Fischer sat in front of the English agent’s receiving station, headphones on, head rolled back, snoring loudly. He wore civilian clothes and not a uniform, despite the fact that he carried a concealed gun.
Ever since sending the message as Erica Calvert, he’d been on twenty-four-hour listening duty, her former radio tuned to the correct frequency. If SOE took the bait they’d set, he would, at some point, receive a reply.
The professor jerked upright when he heard the beeps of the first letters of the transmission. Righting his headphones, he began transcribing the dots and dashes. Joy pervaded him as he worked. Von Waltz’s trap was a success! London believed they were radioing their agent, on the run in Paris!
He decrypted the Morse into text. He checked it twice, then walked, as fast as his bowed legs and arthritic knees would allow him, to von Waltz’s office.
He banged at von Waltz’s doors, causing Hertha to call, “Professor, wait—”