The engineer had not seen him, Dirk assured himself in satisfaction as he settled down at his observation post to await the Frenchman’s next move. He’d have liked the Nazi jerks who’d jeered at him in surveillance-training classes to have witnessed his street skills in avoiding detection after one hell of a long and boring day tailing his mark. Dirk could remember his instructor saying, “Herr Drechsler, in a yard of beehives, you would be about as undetectable as a bear in a beekeeper’s veil.” Well, he wished that horse’s butt could have observed his tradecraft management today. It wasn’t as if shadowing Beaulieu had been a walk in the park. As a matter of fact, the engineer seemed to have knowledge of a few tradecraft tricks himself. Every now and then he’d glance back over his shoulder or stop before a shop window, his gaze not on the display of goods but on the reflection in the glass of the street activity behind him. Now why was that? To see if he was being followed? It was another question mark to chalk up in the Stephane Beaulieu column.

It was now fifteen minutes until four o’clock. Dirk had tailed the engineer from the boardinghouse to the metro through the Latin Quarter in the opposite direction of Honfleur. There he’d walked aimlessly with no apparent destination in mind. He’d taken a gander at a painting on the wall of a convent with a lot of other people standing around admiring it. It was a thing of beauty dabbled on stone by somebody who must have wanted to bring a little sunshine to the street—the saints bless ’em, as his Lutheran mother would say. Then on the Frenchman had sauntered to the shops and bistros in the twisting streets of the fourteenth arrondissement. He had remained nowhere long. Then the engineer had checked his watch and set off with more purpose until just a few minutes ago, when he’d entered a little out-of-the-way tea and book shop up from the Catacombs. Dirk’s heart had begun to thump. The spot showed promise. Was Stephane meeting Nicholas Cravois there?