Jacketless, shirtsleeves rolled up, Karl had nearly finished packing the last of the classified material. He assumed it had been spirited away from Derrick’s two offices to keep it out of Allied hands, but his aide was clearly mystified, since the colonel’s suite was no safer place to store them. Actually, unknown to Karl, Derrick fully intended to turn the boxes over to the detail of Americans sent to take him into custody. He expected their knock on the door at any hour.

By mid-June, he had landed on a scheme to get Victoria safely out of Paris and into Allied hands. Derrick had made contact with an intelligence officer attached to the U.S. Army’s Fourth Infantry Division and offered himself as an enemy asset upon their arrival in Paris. An SS colonel in the Sicherheitsdienst with access to highly sensitive material would be considered a coup whose value would trump all other arresting bodies. His proposition had been snapped up immediately. He would be at the Hotel Crillon with the classified documents, he had told the officer. Derrick had rejected his initial impulse to base his offer on the rescue of Victoria at the count’s chateau, reasoning that a preliminary evacuation in the current climate could easily be bungled or, more likely, agreed to but ignored, since it was not a top priority of the advancing forces.

So he would wait until he was face-to-face with a representative of the U.S. Army to disclose that an American woman and OSS operative awaited extraction in a chateau in the French countryside. That morning, Derrick had tried to telephone Victoria, but he had only reached Alois on a line with extremely poor reception. Derrick had made out that Mademoiselle Colbert was in her room and could not come out to the phone. Maids were cleaning the chateau for the return of the count and his wife in early September. Did the colonel wish him to convey his message? Derrick had shouted instructions that she was to remain at the chateau until a U.S. Army vehicle arrived to fetch her. He hung up deeply disappointed. The call would have been the last time he would hear Victoria’s voice. He’d also had possibly good news to tell her, but the line had gone dead before he could relate it. Her friend, Mademoiselle Dufor, was not at Dachau. At least, her name was not on the camp’s roll. According to the Drancy commandant, she had been deported in June. There was hope that the woman had managed to escape.