A sick ache filled his chest, radiated down his arms, burned like a lump of coal at the back of his neck. Achim would have thought he was having a heart attack if he had not known the source of his pain. His hopes, his dreams, his future lay broken back in that priest’s hole in Mademoiselle Dufor’s apartment. Bernadette Dufor was a spy, a conniving, deceiving, lying spy, a traitor to his belief and faith in her—in them!—and in the mural as simply a painting. He had been deceived into protecting a spy’s mode to communicate with her cohorts in the French Resistance or whatever rotten group she was working with. From the beginning, he had suspected the painting of being a clandestine tool and should have bypassed his ox-headed commander’s objections and gone straight to the Gestapo with his suspicions. Then he would have been spared the agony he suffered now.

The shock of his discovery had forced him to his bed Saturday. He’d deserted his post and staggered home to crawl under his loving grandmother’s quilted tribute to her grandson and pull it over his head. His bed and quilt had been his haven to take his disappointments and shattered trust since he was a child. In it, he could disappear from the world’s cruelties—his father and stepmother, his teachers, the bullies at school, the girls he had admired who had laughed at him, of whom Mademoiselle Bernadette Dufor had turned out to be the worst. In this dark, quiet retreat, this cocoon, he could nurse his injuries, plan his revenge. It took him the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday and Monday before he emerged from the swaddle of his bolt-hole.