Thus it was with relief that Chris spotted a man of short stature and bent shoulders enter the bistro alone and look about him with the air of the proverbial absentminded professor. Chris raised a hand, and Jules Garnier spied him over the scholarly rims of his spectacles, his expression clearing of its myopic confusion to beam a look of relief. He seized Chris heartily by the shoulders and cheek-kissed him in the customary manner of a French greeting, a perfect display of welcome to a new staff member. “I am most happy to see that you made it,” Jules whispered after they were seated in a far corner and ordered croissants and coffee. They had agreed to converse in French. “I was very concerned when I was told that you were not at the rendezvous point.”

“I was dropped off course,” Chris explained and told him of the farmer and his wife and teenaged son who had discovered him hidden in the grain of their loft and had not betrayed him to the German soldiers who banged on their door in the middle of the night and demanded to search their house and outbuildings for an Allied agent they believed had parachuted down near their farm. Not even when the Germans had made off with all the precious eggs and chickens in the henhouse had the family given him up. They had even arranged transportation for him into Paris. After the war, Chris vowed that he would find his way back to the farmhouse to express his gratitude. “They were very brave, like you, Herr Garnier,” he said.

With a grimace and shrug of his shoulders, the director dismissed his own efforts as nothing. “All I’ve done is perform some small measure of resistance against this tide of gray rats that have invaded my country.”

The man’s efforts were hardly nothing. Before the United States and Germany were at war, Alistair Renault had made a trip across the water and learned of the formation of a special school for the young sons of the Nazi elite that would be housed in the Sorbonne. The Vichy regime had begun to expel Jewish professors and students from the Sorbonne and supplant them with teachers and apostles of Nazi ideology. The goal was to convert the hallowed liberal arts school into an institution that excluded all non-Aryans and offer only disciplines that furthered the nationalist swill of the Third Reich. In Germany, Hitler had ordered public schools to increase their compulsory physical education requirement for students from two hours a week to two hours a day. The major had rightly conjectured that the same directive would apply to the special school formed in the Sorbonne, which would then necessitate the need for more physical education instructors.