The men spun around and spotted Bridgette almost at the door. The lance corporal raised his voice. “You will come with us, mademoiselle. If you resist, you will be shot.” He kept his hand on his holstered pistol as the pair moved toward Bridgette and quickly grabbed her arms.

“May I ask why I am being arrested?” she asked.

“You are not being arrested. Our orders are to bring you in for questioning.”

“Why?”

“You have been reported.”

“For what?” Bridgette glanced at the designer who had pointed at her, the woman looking frightened as the eyes of the others turned coldly upon her.

“You will be told!”

All stood watching with frozen faces as Bridgette was marched out, then Madame Boucher whirled to the designer who had given her away. “You whore!” she screamed and slapped the terrified woman’s face. “Get your things and get out! You are fired! And when France is liberated, I shall make sure that you are hunted down and feathered and tarred as a French collaborator!”

“No! No! You must believe me, madame. I am not a French collaborator! I am not responsible for Mademoiselle Dufor’s arrest. I regret pointing her out—”

Jeanne drew back her hand again, and the designer scurried out of the room, the hisses and boos of her fellow coworkers following her.

Bridgette was taken to 93 Rue Lauriston, a quiet little street in an unobtrusive neighborhood in the sixteenth arrondissement that housed a soundproofed third floor where the French Gestapo took French Jews, Resistance fighters, and various other enemies of the Third Reich, and subjected them to the most vicious interrogations of all their brother police organizations. Bridgette was plunked down and shackled to her chair in a hall on the first floor of the three-story building. Now and then when a door opened at the head of the high flight of stairs, she could hear faint screams of torment coming from above. As taught, she breathed slowly in and out in an effort to remain calm and detached while considering the facts of her situation.

Typically, the organization’s arrests were made in dramatic fashion by men in the upper grades, not by pipsqueaks like those sent to fetch her. She must not be that important a catch. At first she’d leaped to the possibility that one of the team had been caught and made to talk, but if so, she would now be upstairs with the rest of the tortured and damned, so she tried to ease her concern on that score. Her accuser was probably the designer who’d denounced her out of jealousy with no real proof of her guilt. She had not officially been arrested but merely brought in for questioning. She held on to that slight difference as a reason for hope.