His knees shook at the thought of meeting the great man, and Dirk lost his nerve to walk boldly up to the house and knock on the door where he’d seen him and Stephane Beaulieu step out together. Instead, he hid out in the churchyard across the street and glued his eye to the same small opening in the cemetery wall, but he saw no one leave or enter the house. After an hour of unproductive surveillance, tired of standing, of being cold, he thought to hell with it and walked quickly to the house across the street.

The door was opened by a woman Dirk judged to be a cleaning lady from her faded kerchief and apron and the aged and weary look of someone who’d scrubbed floors all her life. She carried a broom and started when she saw his uniform. Dirk guessed he must have interrupted her sweeping.

“Oui, monsieur?”

Dirk, pencil poised above the folded underside of a letter-sized sheet of paper, asked officiously in his sketchy French, “I’m taking names of the residents on this street, madame. Who lives here and how many?”

“No one now, monsieur,” the woman answered. “The owners have gone to Switzerland. I do not know their names. I was hired to clean the house in their absence.”

“I must see for myself.” Dirk brushed by the woman into a hall flanked by several rooms. The air held the staleness of a vacated house. White sheets shrouded the furniture. The kitchen showed no signs and gave off no smells of recent cooking. Mattresses were bare. Wardrobes, empty.

The charwoman followed him, still holding the broom. After his quick search, Dirk spun to her. “Danke, madame.” But as he started to leave, he decided to cast caution to the wind. He unfolded the letter-sized sheet to expose its face. It was the WANTED poster of Nicholas Cravois. “Have you ever seen this man?”

The woman peered at it, then shook her head. “No, monsieur.”

“Have you ever heard the name or met Stephane Beaulieu?”

“No, monsieur.”

“Danke.”

On the way home, to soothe the frustration of a fruitless mission, Dirk stopped at a bakery patronized by Germans and treated himself to several canelés, luscious little custardy cakes flavored with rum and vanilla and enclosed in a thin, caramelized shell. Had he glanced back over his shoulder, he would have seen the charwoman without kerchief and apron and broom set off in the opposite direction in a rush of her own that belied Dirk’s impression of her age and profession.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Late Tuesday morning, a white-coated figure from the fingerprinting unit at Abwehr headquarters laid a manila envelope upon the desk of Major General Konrad March. “The report that you ordered, Herr General,” he said. “Do you wish me to interpret?”

“Nein danke. I’ll take it from here.”