Tuesday afternoon, Bridgette returned to the convent to find that Achim was back at his post. This morning as she’d left for work, she had mixed emotions about his continued absence. She had begun to worry that something had happened to him, but that morning right after the lift of curfew, she’d found a note from Limpet, their fisherman, on the floor beneath the letter drop asking for a cutout and immediately transmitted the request to the major. He’d come back with the message: Done. Usual time and place, and Bridgette had felt relief that she could relay it to Limpet by code without being under the watchful eye of Achim.

As Bridgette approached the convent, she could see that Achim was deep into study of the mural and frowning. Her heart jumped. Had he discovered the extra detail on Limpet’s code symbol? She put on a happy face. “Achim! It’s so good to see you! I’ve been worried about you. Have you been ill?”

“You could say that,” he said in a tone absent of the cheer of his usual greeting. He pointed with his truncheon at the mollusk. “That wasn’t there before.”

Bridgette, surprised at his abrupt manner, said, “Oh, you do have an eye. Yes, the inspiration hit me this morning. From time to time I feel I must add some other touches to the mural for greater depth. Do you like what I did to the limpet?”

“Not particularly,” he said, his eyes roving the mural. “Gilding the rose, if you ask me. I see the nose tweak, as you called it—the diagonal line—has disappeared.”

Bridgette retained her smile despite the clear note of insinuation that the mark was more than a harmless prank. “Yes, I found the perfect solution to eradicate it as if it had never been,” she said.

“You should not have touched it. In the future, should other nose tweaks appear, you are to let them be until I can investigate further, do you understand?”

Bridgette felt a flare of resentment. What in the world had gotten into him to set her back to square one with him? “It’s my mural, Achim. It should be for me to decide what to do about such marks.”

He turned to her, eyes cold. “It is now the property of Paris because it appears on a public street. I am a servant of the people, so it is for me to decide if such marks should be erased. They could mean something seditious.”

Bridgette forced a laugh over a catch of panic in her chest. “Seditious? Oh, Achim, that’s ridiculous.”

“You laugh at me, mademoiselle?” he said, his voice pitched high in indignation. “You will not do so when I am a member of the Vichy police and am in a position to treat such impudence as it deserves.”