Once again, Colonel Derrick Albrecht found himself in a situation where he had to decide what to do with Victoria Grayson, now proven to be a foreign undercover agent he was almost certain worked for the OSS. He had not made contact with her since the night of the premiere almost a week before. She must be wondering what he was up to, what he had in mind for her attentions beyond their Sunday bouts. It was now Friday, November 13, a date on the calendar purported by much of the world to be an unlucky day. Bad things happened when Friday fell on the thirteenth of the month. His mother never put a foot outside the door on that day. She claimed personal experience to support the belief that it was the most dangerous twenty-four hours on the calendar. Derrick wondered if Victoria believed in the superstition. He would predict she’d scoff it off as nonsense.

He should get up and go, he thought, release Karl to his own Friday evening diversions and call it a night, as his long-ago Harvard friends would have said. He had nothing he wanted to do and nowhere he particularly desired to be, although that was not exactly true. He had canceled his evening with Celeste. They were to meet her friends at a popular cabaret, but he was in no mood for the frenzied atmosphere of a smoke-filled dance hall loud with people desperate to forget that the war was happening. Celeste’s cronies were a brittle-witted, caustic-tongued assortment of artists, writers, musicians, and film people as shallow as their talents, and they had begun to bore him.

Thus he remained in his office enveloped in the fragrant smoke of a Montecristo swirling under the light of a single desk lamp. He could think most clearly and dispassionately about the duties of his job here in his cold, impersonal office rather than in his hotel quarters, where familiar objects made him long for home and family. Somehow his brief acquaintanceship with Victoria Grayson had unlatched the door to the memories of the untroubled boy he had been in those days, so in contrast to the man of his later years.

But then, in those days, Germany was not at war.

Glorious Victoria…Whatever should I do with you, my beauty? It had taken him almost a week to decide while he fought the temptation to call on her. His immediate thought upon discovering the cyanide pill had been to get her out of France before someone else got onto her and her luck ran out. He would return her unmasked but unharmed to whatever American mastermind had thought to plant the perfect woman in his path. And what a brilliant scheme it was!