Karl had noticed the bleeding cut on mademoiselle’s lip on Friday when he thought the colonel had rescued her from Gestapo headquarters. He hadn’t questioned his superior even when he’d seen her hands bound like the other prisoners and treated as roughly right under the eyes of his idol. She was loaded into the van with the other prisoners and forcibly taken inside the Lutetia Hotel. Karl had not seen the colonel since his return to the van an hour later with the order to drive the three captives to an SS location in a remote area of Paris specially prepared for certain kinds of interrogations and secret executions. When he learned Mademoiselle Colbert was to remain behind, Karl had drawn a tenuous breath of relief for the beautiful woman. The fate of the men in the van was sealed. They would not be leaving the special camp alive.

But what of Mademoiselle Colbert’s fate? Karl had not liked the angry set of the colonel’s face the last time he’d seen him. “Mademoiselle Colbert…is she all right?” he’d dared to ask.

“Better now than she will be,” he’d said.

Karl had been shocked.

Several other odd things happened on that trip. At the camp from which no prisoner returned, he’d expected to be met by SS men whose organization controlled the execution center, so he’d been surprised to see two soldiers from the Abwehr come out to take charge of the prisoners, with no presence of the Schutzstaffel about. Karl had brushed off the manning of the camp as part of the SS’s attempt to assimilate the Abwehr into its more extreme operations, the camp being one of them.

Karl had then assisted in unloading the men and taking them to a room with a barred window and no glass that looked out on a stained, bullet-ridden execution pole in a courtyard enclosed by a wall peppered with evidence of what had occurred there. It was a gruesome view, but the Abwehr trainees had clearly misunderstood their orders, for they planned to shackle the three prisoners in the same room. There was comfort in shared misery, so what was the benefit of that tactic to their interrogator? The prisoners would be able to get their stories straight, discuss their strategies, take courage from one another. It was an infraction of procedure, but the trainees’ ignorance was no concern of his.

Back at 45 Boulevard Raspail while waiting further orders, Karl had grabbed a member of the colonel’s office staff to ask what had happened to the beautiful French prisoner brought in earlier, and his hope for Mademoiselle Colbert and his trust in Colonel Albrecht’s protection of her had plummeted.

“She’s been taken to Cell Block B,” he’d answered. “Colonel Albrecht has already begun the interrogation. Too bad. A woman like that…” He’d shaken his head.