On that trip, the spymaster had slipped into the office of the directeur du personnel while the man’s secretary was on a coffee break and found the director crying quietly into a cup of café au lait. A colleague had been executed for objecting to the Sorbonne’s becoming a Nazi indoctrination center. Jules had been easy to recruit. The Sorbonne, owing to the Vichy French and German student enrollment and the new teachers’ connections to the occupiers, had quickly become a boiling pot of Nazi gossip, rumors, and secrets. For several years now Jules had kept his ears perked for information he deemed important to the Allies and passed it to an OSS cutout for transmission to Milton Hall. Alistair Renault had returned to Washington with Jules’s promise to let him know of a physical education opening and begun to seek the perfect candidate to fill it. The directeur du personnel could now turn over his valiantly assumed duties to his new young instructor and get on with his life, such as it was in occupied Paris, perhaps to live out his remaining years in relative safety.

“Tell me about my students,” Chris said.

They were an elitist bunch, Jules informed him, the sons of top-ranking officers in the German High Command, higher-up Gestapo thugs, and Vichy officials, but superior in their mean little minds only because of their fathers’ elevated statuses. In peacetime, the little monsters would never have placed at the Sorbonne.

“How old are these boys?”

“Between seven and eighteen. All are members of the Hitler Youth, the Hitlerjugend. Membership in the organization has been compulsory for school-age children in Germany since 1936. Its aim is to target young people as a special audience for the Nazi Party’s propaganda messages, so your students have been thoroughly indoctrinated into Third Reich ideology and the glorification of Hitler.”

Herr Bauer would find them a great source of information, Jules said. The boys tried to outdo one another in their boasts of their fathers’ exploits and dropped secrets right and left that would have had their Vaters shot if their sons’ carelessness became known. “Listen carefully on playing fields and in locker and classrooms, and you’ll see what I mean,” Jules said. “Also, the fathers like to ask the boys’ instructors to dinner with the idea of winning academic favors to boost their sons’ school records to impress officials when they report to the army at eighteen. Don’t be surprised to receive such invitations.” Behind his glasses, Jules’s nearsighted gaze glinted meaningfully. “If you go to their houses, you might have a chance to use your Minox, no?”