“I’m delighted to hear it. Monsieur Desnos is well?” Victoria had come to know and like the forty-year-old French surrealist poet through her correspondence with him while translating his poem “Mourning for Mourning,” but she’d become worried about him. News had filtered across the Atlantic that he had been writing negatively about the Vichy Regime, the pro-Axis government operating in the Free Zone of Nazi-occupied France, and that his opinions had not been warmly received.

“For the moment. I regret that Robert is a bit too outspoken against the current political situation for his own good. It is not healthy for writers of renown to get too involved in the issues of the day in France just now.” The Frenchman made a slicing motion across his neck. “Off can come one’s head.”

“Are you concerned about yours?” Victoria asked, judging that the author would take every precaution to guarantee that his attractively shaggy head remained on his neck. Not for the first time since reading about him, she wondered if he could be a Nazi collaborator. She could see him worrying with her question, considering how best to reply without risking her regard. Willard would have told him her fiancé and brother flew for the RAF. Relief leaped into his eyes at the approach of the wine steward.

“I try not to get involved in politics,” Beaumont answered offhandedly before giving an order for a specific champagne to the sommelier. When he bowed away, the author smiled across the table at Victoria and explained, “I’ve ordered a bottle from the north of France where the distinct taste and purity of the wine is due to the chalky soil and continental growing conditions. You’ll like it I’m sure.”

She glanced at her watch. “If only I had time to truly enjoy it. My brother will be here at any moment. I’m sure Willard warned you.”

“He did. Therefore…” He touched his fingertips to his lips and threw a mock kiss into the air. “Let us make hay while the sun shines, as your imaginative countrymen would say.”

“So they do,” Victoria agreed and skirted to a subject safer for her temperament by engaging the writer in his favorite topic—himself. As she expected, the Frenchman applied his charm with a trim of humility. Americans were impressed by humility in great men, so the author had expressed in a French interview. Modesty presented an appealing contrast to expectations. While the writer waved aside her obligatory praise of his novel, its salutary reviews, industry awards, and movie deal as embarrassing—“I told them it doesn’t matter to me whether Claudette Colbert or Marlena Dietrich plays the lead”—Victoria watched a solitary pigeon, a winged gray blur, settle in the spray of the famed Pulitzer Fountain on Fifth Avenue. She felt a leap of excitement. Ralph should have landed by now.