Bridgette was now more convinced than ever that Achim Fleischer was no threat to the clandestine activity going on behind his back. The focus of the street’s watchdog was on the protection of the mural—and on her. If he’d noticed the Dragonfly foursome at all, Victoria especially, he took them for ordinary residents of the neighborhood whose jobs took them daily past the house next door. No danger on that score.

Bridgette recognized her hollow feeling as having little to do with Achim Fleischer. He was just another question mark on a cold, dreary morning when she was wondering when or if she’d ever see her friends again. Her first thought after the alarm clock went off was that if they’d elected to catch those Lysanders, they’d all be waking up in the safety and warmth of Milton Hall, a little hungover after an evening at the Crown and Scepter, their stomachs still full of the pub’s crunchy fish and chips. In a few days, they’d be heading home, addresses exchanged and plans in place to meet earlier than the date in New York.

The Frenchman plainly believed—as did the major—that they would not survive. The poor man had been horrified at their unanimous vote to remain. His face had drooped longer than a basset hound’s at their decisions. As they got up to leave, he’d heard the scrape of their chairs as cell doors slamming and coffin lids closing. “Your case officer is not going to like this,” he’d said, to which Liverwort had replied in her serene way, “We know.”

Achim Fleischer, while an irritating pebble in her shoe, represented familiarity and stability. His absence simply increased her feeling of being alone and lonely on a day that offered no salvation from her gloomy mood. She missed her friends terribly. Seeing them for such a short while yesterday was like a drop of water on a thirsty tongue, and today Frau Helga Richter, the reigning witch from hell, was to come in for a fitting. She was the wife of Sturmbannführer Gottlob Richter, the SS major in charge of the notorious Nazi transit facility in Drancy, a suburb northeast of Paris. The camp was a holding tank to house Jews until they could be transferred to concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, where it was rumored they would be gassed. Horror stories had leaked out about the brutality of the guards and inhumane living conditions under the whip of Major Richter that, at the risk of their jobs, the staff of the House of Boucher had been warned not to bring up to his wife.