At the House of Boucher, frantic wives and mistresses openly discussed their husbands’ and lovers’ military strategies to counter the oncoming tide. In Bucky’s engineering firm, it was nothing for desperate German engineers to invite the French into meetings once conducted in hush-hush secrecy, and Victoria could hardly keep up with the flow of classified information bandied about in the fencing school and the trickle collected from the colonel.

The result was that the team made almost daily passes by the dead-letter box.

Colonel Albrecht’s top stakeout expert kept his vigil and saw nothing amiss on the street of the Sisters of Charity to rouse his suspicions, though he worried a bit about the frequent passing of his four targets along the street that might establish a pattern of interest to anyone else watching. And then on his watch one morning in late May, his surveillance sharpened when a blind beggar wearing dark glasses took up a sitting position before the wall with his tin cup, cane, and a sign reading: PLEASE SHARE FOOD. The watchman observed him intently all day, saw him plead pathetically with passersby, some who dropped a few coins into his cup, and one who gave him a small wrapped package revealed to be bread, which he tore into immediately and consumed as fast as he could. The surveillance expert took every watch after that and after a few days, strolled by the man to check him out himself. He decided the beggar was harmless. In fact, a position by the mural before a convent was a smart place to beg, especially since the artist who lived in the convent—such a lovely little thing, always fashionably dressed—took pity on him and put something for breakfast into his hands every morning as she left for work. The veteran stakeout man knew that any occurrence unusual to the street was worth reporting, be it large or small. You never knew, but if he reported the beggar, the poor man would be dragged into SD headquarters, questioned unmercifully, and when proven harmless, cast out onto the street frightened and confused and without aid to return to wherever he called home. The watcher would spare him that.

On June 4, Konrad imparted good news. The admiral had been released from house arrest and assigned the meaningless job as head of the department of Mercantile Warfare and Economic Combat Measures. The posting was an insult to his rank and former position, but the demotion meant that he was free. Champagne corks popped in the general’s house that night.