Her uncommunicative responses and unwillingness to engage in conversation would have made her boring company at the Ritz had it not been for the pleasure of looking at her. He talked and sipped wine, a lightly oaked chardonnay, while she ate. She was pleasant to watch even then. Many women were ugly when they chewed. Champing jaws and bouncing facial muscles could distort the loveliest of faces. While she cut into the delicious flaky tart with the restraint one did not often see among hungry Parisians these days, he imagined her hair released from its luxurious chignon and the feel of her skin and curves of her body beneath the black suit and silk blouse. Of course she was fully aware of his admiration, but she met it with the cool disregard with which she ate the custard-filled pastry made with the most expensive ingredient in the world. However, her patent disinterest in him—or antipathy—would not discourage him from learning more about Mademoiselle Veronique Colbert. It was his job.

To that end, the following morning he’d dispatched his most competent wolfhound to dig up whatever information on his aloof fencing partner was available. His detection dog reported that according to her college records, she had been a good student, majoring in Franco studies and graduating at twenty, but he was able to sniff out little else from that quarter. Her professors had been Jews and political dissidents who had fallen under the Nazi ax and had either been deported, disappeared, or sent to extermination camps. Without an intensive search of student files, he could locate no one who could tell him who her classmates were these two years after her graduation. School officials referred him to the director of personnel, one Jules Garnier, because of his long tenure at the Sorbonne. Yes, indeed, the director remembered seeing a young woman of that name about the halls of the university, but he’d had no personal contact with her. His position did not call for him to deal directly with students. He remembered Mademoiselle Colbert because of her great beauty.

Surprisingly, she appeared to have no boyfriend. Since she’d only recently returned to Paris, her fellow instructors at the fencing school and her neighbors in the quiet residential hotel knew little about her except to mention that Mademoiselle Colbert kept to herself and did not invite personal interchange.

So it would seem that hardly anybody knew anything about Veronique Colbert except SS Colonel Derrick Albrecht. He had gleaned much from his short acquaintance with the beautiful instructor of foil.