The authoritative roar of a German motorcade cruising down Edgar Quinet Boulevard was another desecration that Monique Barton would find appalling. The famous boulevards were now thoroughfares for gray-uniformed men driving loud military vehicles flaunting the Nazi flag and parade grounds to show off Germany’s martial might. Venerable tower clocks had been reset to Berlin time, and signs in German defiled the stately splendor of the famed plane trees lining the streets. Most of all, though, she would have loathed the cruising radio trucks that blared German music and Nazi propaganda on streets in quiet neighborhoods. The music, culinary delights, color, gaiety, and light of Paris were gone. In all this darkness, where was his father?

Bucky had left for La Petite Madeleine hours early to allow time for a metro ride to the sixteenth arrondissement and the chic neighborhood of Passy-Auteuil, where his aunt lived. Before he left Oklahoma, he’d made a note of his aunt’s address, which he’d learned during training was in the area most occupied by high-ranking German officers, especially the Schutzstaffel, better known as the SS, the most vicious, anti-Semitic, and feared organization of the Third Reich. Its members considered themselves not only the elite of the Nazi Party, but of all mankind.

The hissing sound of the initials SS and the lightning bolts symbol reminded him of venomous snakes. Bucky feared for his widowed aunt, who had chosen not to flee with her wealthy neighbors when it became clear that a German invasion was imminent. He knew Aunt Claire would have been disgusted by the cowardly, self-serving exodus of her privileged French countrymen to safer ground in Switzerland, Spain, or America. In one of her last letters to his mother before Germany declared war against the United States, Aunt Claire had described how the Nazi military mucky-mucks had moved in to occupy the vacated houses of her neighbors, freely helping themselves to their beds and larders and wine cellars. Her next-door neighbor was an SS colonel charged with the duty of the deportation of Jews to concentration camps.