The captain addressed Bridgette in the late afternoon, after she’d sat for three hours shackled to her chair in the hall. She had not yet been dragged up to the third floor like several other struggling prisoners shoved through the doors of the headquarters of the French Gestapo, but she had endured her own brand of torture waiting for the moment when she would join them. Finally, the captain once again had her deposited before his desk, where he looked at her hard and long, as if searching for something he had missed before.

“Can you explain its presence?” he asked.

The captain hoped that his stony gaze and her fear of the upstairs cells would be sufficient to loosen her tongue, and they could get this over with. He was tired and wanted to go home. The girl might have fooled him, but he was inclined to believe his first impressions of her. She was probably a very good dress designer, and she clearly possessed talent as a painter, but that little blond head was too innocent to worry with wireless sets and code murals and secret messages passed on the sly. No search revealed an encryption pad by which to check her handwriting, and the mother superior of the convent declared that if her boarder had been transmitting messages, she would have known. Nothing the informant, posing as a blind man and beggar, had brought to the Carlingue had panned out. The informant’s claim that the mail slot in the house next to the convent was a dead-letter box proved false. It was a storage room for sewing materials in line with Bernadette Dufor’s work, and a check of the mural found nothing to indicate that it was any more a code device than his wife’s grocery list. The stone painting was an amazing piece of artwork. Demolishing it would incite more trouble in that district than the French police were capable of handling at this explosive time. The captain believed her story about her divorced aunt, too, and a French interpreter of English could detect no trace of an American accent in her French speech. The damned informant had misread her.

But there was the point of the wireless to be explained. “Well?” he demanded.

Bridgette had her story ready. “I…was approached by two men of the French Resistance demanding to use my room to operate their wireless set. They would transmit their messages while I was at work and during the hours the nuns were out of the convent,” Bridgette said, doe eyes beseeching the captain to believe her. “They wanted the convent because its thick walls provided protection from the German direction finders. They would not take no for an answer.”

“How did they know about your room and the hidden alcove?”

“They said a former nun who left the order told them.”