“That’s not all,” Madame Gastain said. “The shops have been ordered to replace their usual Christmas toys with facsimiles of tanks, fighter planes, and machine guns. In one store today, I saw that the star on top of the Christmas tree had been replaced with a swastika.”

Chris said, “The posters went up in the school today. The staff has been ordered to instruct the students that Christmas is not about the coming of Jesus but the coming of Hitler and that they are to consider him the real savior of the world. He’s to be called Savior Führer.”

“Verdammt noch mal!” (Damn them!) Konrad exploded.

“I have lived too long,” Madame Gastain sighed.

Brad and Chris had noticed that the general’s tongue had become more unguarded around them, especially after he’d had a few glasses of schnapps. While not exactly careless, he was not as careful with the classified files he brought home, files that should have remained under lock and key at Abwehr headquarters, presumably because he did not trust his office staff. Brad reported that Konrad was also a little more open in discussing military matters with fellow officers aboard Captain Allard’s boat.

“What do you think? Deliberately indiscreet?” Brad questioned Chris.

“I’m not sure…What’s his game if he is?”

“Could be he simply trusts us?”

“I would think trust had been ironed out of him like the wrinkles in his uniform.”

But none of the intel picked up from the study desk and the fishing boat had come back to point a finger at them, so the two young operatives carried on.

Victoria, also, was careful not to accept too readily Colonel Derrick Albrecht’s trust in her. She could not fathom the man. How could a human being of such intellect, culture, and civility, an appreciator of the world’s great art and music and literature, the epitome of civilized man, belong to an inhumane organization like the SS? Daily reports circulated of SS brutalities that curdled the blood. She had witnessed for herself an SS officer calmly pull out his gun and shoot a civilian on the street, leaving him to die in a pool of blood in the snow for no other offense than his failure to step out of the officer’s way. The casual murder left Victoria so sick that she canceled an evening engagement with the colonel, unable to bear the sight of his uniform.

She no longer saw him alone. After their drive into the country to compensate for the aborted picnic, his invitations were to military social functions, dinner engagements with fellow officers, a cinema, or a restaurant party, his deportment toward her always meticulously correct and his company pleasant. The Nazi functions made her skin crawl, but they served up platters of intelligence that Victoria thought must surely water the mouth of even the jaded Major Renault.