Victoria stiffened. He was the student who’d pestered her and tried to make time with her when she first arrived at the school. He’d quit taking lessons after the fencing master was ordered to remove his name from her roster to open a spot for another German student of greater skill and more promise for improvement. The lieutenant had accepted the put-down poorly and believed her responsible for his removal.

She heard him begin his descent, arrogance in every deliberate step on the cement stairs. Victoria felt her mouth go dry. Colonel Albrecht was not due to arrive for another fifteen minutes. For the first time, Victoria would be relieved to see him. The lieutenant bent his head to leer around the edge of the stairwell at her, and Victoria demanded in her most imperious tone, “What are you doing here?”

The lieutenant stepped down into the light of the basement. He looked more official in his military uniform and shiny jackboots than in fencing clothes, more in charge. He carried a swagger stick, a wooden dowel covered with leather that Victoria saw as a pathetic attempt to augment his lowly status. “I saw lights on in the fencing hall and thought that odd since the school is closed on Sunday,” he said in patchy French. “I decided to investigate.”

He was lying, Victoria thought. He’d decided to call on her at her hotel and frightened the hotel concierge into telling him her whereabouts. “Well, as you can see, there is nothing to investigate here.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” His gaze lit on the bras and panties strung along the line, prurient menace in his eyes, then flicked to the swords set against the stairwell. Slowly and deliberately, he laid his swagger stick and hat on a laundry table and pulled off his gloves. “This is where you do your clothes washing?”

“I did today.” It was time to drop names. “I came early before my appointment with Colonel Derrick Albrecht. The salle is open because he meets me here on Sunday afternoons for private fencing sessions. Sunday is the only day in the week he is free for such activity. Perhaps you know him? The chief of the counterintelligence division of the SD? I am expecting him at any moment.”

The lieutenant began removing his overcoat, and Victoria’s pulse pounded at the base of her throat. Next would come his jacket. She would make short work of him if she could get to the swords, but he stood between her and the stack propped against the staircase behind him. “Colonel Derrick Albrecht? Germany’s famous champion of foil?” he said. “I know of him, of course. What would you, as skilled as you are, have to teach him?”