He spent a moment considering this. His lips were sealed tight, and his nostrils flared a little as he breathed. Finally he nodded. “I see.”
He returned the identity card and she stuffed it back in her pocketbook. He was staring at the parting of her hair, she knew. As she fumbled with the old, worn clasp that wouldn’t properly shut, he spoke again, and this time she noticed that his French was actually excellent, that he didn’t have that usual awkward, guttural way with the delicate vowels. He caressed them almost as a Frenchman would, with reverence. Of course, this only made Daisy dislike him still more, if that were possible. How dare he lay some kind of ownership on her beloved native tongue! At last she forced the clasp shut and went to retrieve her books, but the German had already bent his long body and retrieved them for her, the final straw. She hated him. She snatched the books back and pressed them against her chest.
“If that’s all, lieutenant colonel—”
“One more question, if you please, madame. What is your business here?”
“My business?”
“If you please, madame.”
She wanted to say that she lived here, you German turd, this was her home, that was her business here! But that wasn’t quite true anymore, and besides it would make him suspicious. So she said the truth. “I’m delivering some books to my grandmother.”
“Your grandmother stays here?”
“Yes.” Again, she bit herself off before she could babble out her grandmother’s name and history and state of health.
Against odds, he smiled a little. “Your grandmother likes to read?”
“Yes.”
“Then let us carry the books up to her together.”
“No! That isn’t necessary. I’m perfectly capable of carrying a few books up a few stairs.”
“No doubt, but German chivalry demands that I don’t allow you to.”
Well! Her hatred was now so strong, it gave her actual courage, imagine that. Like a glass of good champagne, swiftly drunk. She gave this obnoxious fellow a look of French defiance such as even her grandmother would approve, one that must communicate through even the thickest German skull what Daisy d’Aubigny Villon thought of German chivalry.
She spoke in a voice that measured about zero degrees centigrade, although her insides shook a little. “I assure you, lieutenant colonel, I don’t need any help.”
“Madame, please. You must allow me—”
“You have far more important matters to attend to, I’m sure.”
At that instant, there was a roar of laughter from the Little Bar, and Bernard appeared at her elbow.
“Herr Lieutenant Colonel,” he said hurriedly, “there is a telephone call for you at the bar.”
The German answered without taking his gaze from Daisy’s face. “A telephone call? That’s odd. From whom?”
“The party wouldn’t say, I’m afraid.”
“Yes. Very well.”
Then the German did something strange. He lifted Daisy’s right hand away from the books, so that she had to shift her weight to keep her grip on them, and he kissed the tips of her fingers with his thin, soft lips.
“Madame,” he said, “you will please excuse me.”
Daisy tore her fingers away and darted past him to the stairs. On the fourth step, she turned to thank Bernard with her eyes, but it was not the doorman who remained there in the hall with the chandelier glittering on his pale hair. It was the German officer, who had taken a gold watch from some inner pocket of his uniform and now stared at the open case, inspecting the hour.
Now, Daisy might have spent her childhood inside the walls of the Ritz Paris, but that was the Place Vend?me side, in Grandmère’s permanent suite that was like an apartment lifted straight from the Palace of Versailles, except more homelike. （The Ritz liked to think of itself as a kind of grand country residence rather than a hotel.） This building, the rue Cambon side, connected to the main building by a long gallery that traversed the garden courtyard, wasn’t nearly as familiar to her. In fact, so flustered was Daisy by the encounter with the German, she turned down the wrong corridor and spent an awful, dizzy moment in total discombobulation, imagining the entire hotel had turned on some new and previously unknown axis. Then recognition came to her in a flash—oddly enough, the memory of some childhood game of hide and seek—and she turned back and went down the correct corridor this time, humbled, heart still pounding against her ribs, mouth dry, fingertips itching where the German officer had kissed them. She found Grandmère’s door and knocked on the louvered panel.