“Guten Tag, Madame Travert!” The Gestapo officer touches the visor of his cap with its skull, and I recognize him. A slither of loathing slips through my veins as Obersturmführer Wolff looks me up and down, his gaze as cold as the day I watched him beat a boy to death.
“What a surprise to see you again,” he says. Is it a surprise, or did he come to arrest me? “Surely you remember me . . .”
The fact I want to spit in his eye makes me reckless. “I don’t know. We see so many Germans in France these days . . .”
He laughs. “Well, you are unforgettable. And I have come to know your husband. A good policeman—excellent detective. Very helpful.”
He can’t begin to fathom how sick that makes me to hear.
He’s introducing me to his partner when Anna appears in the corridor, her expression inscrutable. “Gentlemen,” she says, with a tone I’ve never heard before—somehow both softly feminine and absolutely authoritative. “My father will be with you shortly. Would you care to wait upstairs in the library? Madame Travert and I can arrange refreshments.”
I’d like to arrange rat poison in their wine.
Then Wolff says, “Actually, I was hoping for a tour of the facility—particularly your little museum of Americana that I’ve heard so much about.”
I blink. Don’t tell me the bloody Gestapo are here as sightseers!
“I’m afraid it’s locked for renovations,” Anna replies smoothly.
It doesn’t put him off. “I’m sure someone has a key.”
“It’s really not worth the trouble,” she says with a charming little laugh that only I would know is all artifice. “Nothing of real value to interest you.”
“Nothing of real value, she says!” Wolff slaps the other officer on the back. “That’s what my friend says too, but he’s not a civilized man. As for me, I spent a summer in the States. I can’t say much for American beer, but I love their writers. Edgar Allan Poe. Such bone-chilling tales. Who could forget the ‘The Cask of Amontillado’？” Wolff pretends to shiver. “To have such patience to take the revenge of burying someone alive . . . As Madame Travert perhaps recalls, I myself don’t like to put off the satisfaction of doling out punishment!”
My shiver is real, because he says this with the barely suppressed glee of a boy who burns ants with a magnifying glass. Then he continues, “But to return to a more genteel subject, I heard you keep certain American valuables here—possessions that once belonged to George Washington, Dr. Franklin, and so on. Some Great War trinkets from the fabled Lafayette Escadrille. I’m eager to see them. I’m a collector of sorts.”
“Those belongings aren’t on the premises anymore.” Anna delivers this bald-faced lie in a shockingly convincing way. “Renovations, as I said.”
“How disappointing!” says Wolff, coming closer. “I was told the people at this chateau consider themselves guardians of such objects; unlikely to let them out of their sight. I hoped to use this quaint affinity for history to explain to my superiors why the women of this village marched on Bastille Day.”
At this, Anna and I both take a breath, drawing closer together. Despite the brave face, this rattles her. It’s up to me to say, “It wasn’t anything political; only a historical tradition because this is the birthplace of Lafayette.”
“Ah, another great French general,” he says with an edge of mockery. “Remind me of the lands he conquered.”
“He wasn’t a conqueror,” I admit. “He was a liberator.”
Liberator is a dangerous word right now, and Anna gives me an incredulous look. She must think I’m an idiot. And I am, because I am taunting a Gestapo agent while hiding false papers in my underwear. They ought to shoot me for stupidity, but before they can, Madame LeVerrier shuffles into the corridor, eyeing the two officers like they’re dirt tracked in by a careless gardener. “Gentlemen, the baron will see you now.”
With crisp farewells, both Gestapo officers go upstairs. Anna and I both collapse against the locked museum door in relief, and she hisses, “I was afraid he’d find the guns.”
Now it’s my turn to be incredulous. “What guns?”
“George Washington’s dueling pistols.”
It’s laughable that the Germans could be afraid of flintlock pistols from more than a century ago—but they’ve been confiscating everything from hunting rifles to old bayonets. I assumed the baron had a permit for these antiques, but I don’t know what the laws are now in what used to be the Free Zone, and I’m equally sure people have been shot for less.