Bucky was the first to leave. At ten-minute intervals, the others would follow suit. They had each been trained in how to make an immediate and accurate reconnaissance of an area. Bucky would check the street to see if a window browser, a maintenance worker, a shopkeeper plying a broom on his sidewalk, a cyclist working on his bike, or a pedestrian tying his shoe broke away to walk in his direction. He’d take a few steps, then, as if he’d forgotten something, return to the tea shop to warn the others, and they would escape by the exit door. A Gestapo tail would be easy to spot. The men in the black leather overcoats were not known for their streetcraft.

He saw only a lone deliveryman straining to lift a heavy box from a van. At the corner, Bucky glanced back to see that another man wearing a butcher’s apron had come out to give him a hand, their voices loud and voluble in the empty, quiet street. He walked on. Dusk was beginning to fall, and an early October chill gripped the air. Soon, because of the blackout and nine o’clock curfew, Paris would go completely dark and fall eerily silent, the only illumination the dim glow of blue-shrouded lampposts and house lights filtering from behind draped and shuttered windows.

He had arrived in a Paris nothing like the city his mother had described. She would be heartbroken to see the city of her birth and youth now. “You have never heard Schubert’s Ave Maria performed until you’ve heard a Paris street violinist play it on the banks of the Seine,” she’d told him. “The notes float across the water like airborne feathers.”

But those performers and their violins were gone now, and Paris’s street magic was no more. Gone were the verdant open-air markets and the vibrant stalls of the flower sellers. Balconies once draped with riotous roses and ablaze with geraniums and begonias, petunias and lobelias—the botanical pride of Paris—had been displaced to hold rabbit hutches and vegetable bins.

Bucky was especially disappointed at the absence of the food vendors and their stands. He’d looked forward to buying a meal on the fly—light-as-air crepes and savory kebabs and sizzling sausages, roasted potatoes and cheese puffs and caramelized onions on a stick. His mouth had watered at his mother’s description of the smell of freshly baked croissants and baguettes drifting from open doors of bakeries, locked and shuttered now, FERMÉ signs in their windows.